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When I Sing, Mountains Dance

When I Sing, Mountains Dance Anagrama

Please join internationally acclaimed Catalan author Irene Solà Sáez and her award-winning translator into English, Mara Faye Lethem, as they read from and discuss with Helena Buffery the creative process behind this multivoiced book, which Ali Smith described as "fine-tuned to a kind of astonished and astonishing connectivity that’s an act of revolutionary revitalisation up against the odds of any despairing." 


Irene Solà Sáez (born 17 August 1990) is a Catalan writer and an artist. She has exhibited her work at the CCCB in Barcelona and the Whitechapel Gallery in London. Her first book of poems, “Bèstia” won the 2012 Amadeu Oller Prize and her novel “Els dics” the 2017 Documenta Prize. In 2019, she was awarded the Premi Llibres Anagrama de Novel·la for “Canto jo i la muntanya balla” (When I Sing, Mountains Dance). The same year, she also received the Núvol Prize, and the Cálamo Prize for the Spanish edition of the book. In 2020, she won the European Union Prize for Literature and the Maria Àngels Anglada Prize. 

Mara Faye Lethem is an award-winning translator of contemporary Catalan and Spanish prose, and the author of “A Person’s A Person, No Matter How Small”. Her recent translations include books by Patricio Pron, Max Besora, Javier Calvo, Marta Orriols, Toni Sala, Alicia Kopf, and Irene Solà. She is currently translating the collected short stories of Pere Calders as part of her PhD at the University of St Andrews. 

Helena Buffery lectures on contemporary Hispanic culture at University College Cork. Her research interests are in modern and contemporary Hispanic theatre and performance, translation studies and Catalan studies. She has published widely in these fields and recently completed an AHRC-funded project entitled “Staging Exile: Migration and Diaspora in Hispanic Theatre and Performance Cultures”.

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