Spanish · 1897–1981
Pla was a Catalan from the Empordà who spent the 1920s and 1930s as a foreign correspondent in Paris, Rome, Berlin and Moscow, filed several million words of journalism, backed the wrong side in the Civil War and spent the rest of his life partly regretting it. He wrote in Catalan when Catalan was banned from print, published a complete works in forty-six volumes, and cultivated a persona — beret, cigarette, farmhouse at Llofriu — that concealed one of the most disciplined prose writers in twentieth-century Europe. His method was to look at something small with total attention: a fish, a wind, a face in a café, the exact colour of the sea at four in the afternoon in December. He turned down the Catalan Prize of Honour twice, was denied it once for political reasons, and died in the farmhouse he was born near.