Núria Añó

Núria Añó (Catalan pronunciation: [ˈnuɾia aˈɲo], Spanish pronunciation: [ˈnuɾja aˈɲo]) (born 1973 in Lleida, Catalonia, Spain) studied Catalan Philology and German Language. She is a Catalan writer, a translator and a speaker at conferences and symposia, where she gives papers on literary creation or authors like Elfriede Jelinek, Patricia Highsmith, Salka Viertel or Franz Werfel.
Añó started writing tales at a young age and published her first story in 1990. After that some of her short stories have been published in anthology books. In 1996 she was awarded the 18th City of Almenara Joan Fuster Prize for Fiction. Another of her short stories 2066. Comença l'etapa de correcció (2066. Beginning the age of correction) was translated in 2006 into Spanish, French, English, German, Italian and Polish. The short story Presage, written in 2005, is also published into English on the American literary journal When Women Waken.
Her first novel Els nens de l'Elisa was third among the finalists for the 24th Ramon Llull Prize for Catalan literature, the most relevant literary award in Catalan language. L'escriptora morta has been published in 2008 and Núvols baixos, in 2009. La mirada del fill, published in 2012, is her most recent novel.

Añó's writing style is very ambitious and risky, it focuses on the psychology of her characters, generally antiheroes avoiding Manichaeism. "The characters are the most important" in her books, "much more than the topic", due to "an introspection, a reflection, not sentimental, but feminine". Although her novels cover a multitude of topics, treat actual and socially relevant problems and frequently, the core of her stories remains unexplained. Añó asks the reader to discover the "deeper meaning" and to become involved in the events presented.