Isabel-Clara Simó, writer and journalist, was born in Alcoi in 1943, and passed away in Barcelona in 2020. She was one of the most important and widely-read contemporary authors in Catalan language and the Pontas Agency is honored to announce that it has started representing her literary estate, on behalf on her daughters and nieces.
One of her most well-known works, La salvatge (The Wild One) was published in 1994 and was awarded prestigious Sant Jordi Novel Prize. The novel follows divorced sexagenarian Joaquim Simon and the young, fourteen-year-old Dorothy who arrives to Joaquim’s life as a breath of fresh air. He is determined to transform the untamed Dorothy into a perfect, prideworthy role model. So begins this harsh story about the desire for possession and the demons of control and domination.
At the time, it was translated into Spanish, Italian, French, German, Swedish, and Turkish. In 2024, exactly 30 years after its original publication in Catalan, La salvatge (The Wild One) will be available to English-language readers across the globe from 3TimesRebel Press, a UK-based publisher focused on publishing women's voices in translation from minority languages, which will be publishing an English translation by mother-daughter translation duo Martha Tennent and Maruxa Relaño.
Bibiana Mas, founder and publisher of 3TimesRebel Press, said: “You don't know how happy it makes me to be able to welcome Isabel-Clara Simó to 3TimesRebel. I admire the author very much and to be able to bring her work to the English-language world makes me feel immense gratitude.”
La salvatge (The Wild One) will also be made available again in Catalan in 2024, over at Edicions Bromera, who are working hard to collect all of Isabel-Clara Simó’s works and reissue them to honor her legacy in the author’s original language. La salvatge (The Wild One) had been most recently published by Columna.
Throughout her career, Isabel-Clara Simó received many prestigious awards (Premi Sant Jordi, Premi de la Crítica Serra d’Or, Premi de la Crítica dels Escriptors Valencians on four occasions, Premi Andròmina for fiction, Premi Trajectòria de la Setmana del Llibre en Català, the Golden Medal of the City council of Alcoi, Premi Jaume Fuster, among others). In 2017 she was awarded the Premi d'Honor de les Lletres Catalanes, a Lifetime Achievement Award by Omnium Cultural. She published almost seventy books across all genres: fiction, short fiction, young adult fiction, drama, poetry, scripts, essays, and memoir. Her works continue to be reissued in print and are successful long sellers. Some of her most widely recognized works include as Dones (Women, 1997), Júlia (1983), El meu germà Pol (My Brother Pol, 2007), Raquel (1992), La vida sense ell (Life Without Him, 2000), L’amant de Picasso (Picasso’s Lover, 2015), and the posthumous novel El teu gust (Your Taste, 2020).
*Header image © Ricard Cugat
For more information about Isabel-Clara Simó’s work, please contact Anna Soler-Pont (anna@pontas-agency.com)