Spanish · b. 1990
Irene Solà (born 1990 in Malla, Catalonia) is a Catalan writer and visual artist. She studied fine arts at the University of Barcelona and completed a master's degree in literature, film, and visual culture at the University of Sussex. Her 2019 novel Canto jo i la muntanya balla (When I Sing, Mountains Dance) made her the first Catalan writer to win the European Union Prize for Literature, in 2020; its English translation by Mara Faye Lethem was a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2022 and was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Solà's fiction draws on the landscapes, folklore, and oral traditions of rural Catalonia, often narrated through multiple, sometimes non-human, voices. Her follow-up novel, Et vaig donar ulls i vas mirar les tenebres (2023), published in English as I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness (2025), continues this polyphonic style, narrating generations of a cursed family through the voices of its dead women. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages.