Cultural activities

A Subterranean Light - A Conversation and Reading

A Subterranean Light - A Conversation and Reading © María Rodenas

Multi-award-winning poet and novelist Xavier Mas Craviotto will be joined onstage with long-time CWBF collaborator Professor Helena Buffery, for our annual celebration of the Catalan San Jordi Day of Books and Roses. Craviotto’s most recent collection, La llum subterrània (the subterranean light) —“the itinerary of an obsession— begins where his previous collection, La gran nausea (the great nausea), ended, with a poetic mapping of exhaustion, wear and eventual devastation. The subterranean light rises from this devastation: a ‘you’ and an ‘I’ embarking on a journey, which becomes an itinerary of reconstruction, not of what there was previously, but of new realities that may help us survive in a worn-out world with new meanings to which we can cling.


Xavier Mas Craviotto (Navàs, 1996) is a philologist and writer. For four years, he taught Catalan language and culture at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. He is a co-founder of Com ho diria, a digital platform specializing in Catalan youth slang. He has published the novels La mort lenta (2018 Documenta Prize) and La pell del món, as well as the poetry collections Renills de cavall negre (2018 Art Jove Salvador Iborra Competition), La gran nàusea, and La llum subterrània (2023 Ausiàs March Prize). Recently, he also published a short story collection titled Animals inexpressius.

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