With support from the Pauli Bellet Foundation and Institut Ramon Llull, this prolific Catalan writer will join Alan Cheuse International Writers Center for one week, while participating in a George Mason event on September 20 and in a Washington, D.C., bookstore event on September 21, details pending. This is the first time that Institut Ramon Llull is supporting the program at Alan Cheuse Intrnational Writers Center.
A writer and professor of Catalan Literature, Toni Sala has written more than one dozen books. His first, Entomologia (1997), received the Documenta Prize, while Sala also won the 2004 Sant Joan Prize and the 2005 National Culture Prize for with his book Rodalies (2004). Sala made his English debut with the 2014 novel Els nois (The Boys), which was translated to English by Mara Faye Lethem after winning the Catalan Critics' Prize for Fiction. He also received the 2014 City of Barcelona Prize for the essay El cas Pujol.
The Boys was published in English by Two Lines Press. The Kirkus Review called it "A compelling existential mystery, on one level a sort of Catalan answer to Russell Banks’ The Sweet Hereafter, with a closing as haunting as a tale by Poe. Altogether brilliant." Publishers Weekly noted that " One hopes this tremendous novel, already an award-winner overseas, will receive the attention it deserves here." In an interview published in BOMB Magazine, Hal Hlavinka hails the "stunning translation by Mara Faye Lethem" and the "light-footed, death-haunted sentences that tumble along at the shuddering speed of a car crash."
Toni Sala is a member of the Associació d'Escriptors en Llengua Catalana (AELC, Association of Catalan Language Writers).