Institut Ramon LLull

When I Sing, Mountains Dance

Anagrama, 2019
192 pages
Fiction

Canto jo i la muntanya balla

When I Sing, Mountains Dance

Irene Solà

"A lyrical, evocative novel that creates a cosmos of the Pyrenees and opens up a breath-taking window for us onto it."

A polyphony of voices —humans, yes, but also clouds and mushrooms, a roe-deer and a pet dog, water nymphs, witches, ghosts, even the mountains themselves— come together in this luminous cant to our natural world and its eye piercing beauty, the fierce muscle of the seasons and an ode to words themselves, to the power of poetry to highlight the constant coexistence of life and death.

Within the constellation of human homes, a line of open-air poets is struck: first the father with a bolt of lightning to the head and then the son, in a hunting accident twenty years later. This rugged borderland between Camprodon and Prats de Molló bears the scars of this violence and that of witch hunts and the civil war, but its stories and legends are resilient and transcend the human life span. Solà, with a stunning command of language and a use of repetition that makes prose in verse, reminds us we are all animals, we are all landscape and we are all spirits.

FOREIGN RIGHTS CONTACT

Paula Canal
Indent Agency
paula@indentagency.com
www.indentagency.com


Request content sample to literature@llull.cat

RIGHTS SOLD TO:

  • Academic Press (Georgian)
  • Adonis Books (Korean)
  • Alberdania (Basque)
  • Alma Littera (Lithuanian)
  • Anagrama (Spanish)
  • Aurora Boreal (Danish)
  • Blackie Edizioni (Italian)
  • Colibri (Bulgarian)
  • Czarne (Polish)
  • Dar Athar (Arabic)
  • Granta (English)
  • Graywolf Press (English)
  • Heliks (Serbian)
  • Humanitas Fiction (Romanian)
  • Ikaros Books (Greek)
  • Kalandraka (Galician)
  • Ketebe (Turkish)
  • KUD Sodobnost Int (Slovenian)
  • Magveto (Hungarian)
  • Mundareu (Brazilian Portuguese)
  • Nobelman (Dutch)
  • Seuil (French)
  • ThinKingdom (Chinese)
  • Trabanten Verlag (German)
  • Tranan & Transten AB (Swedish)
  • TRI Publishing Centre (Macedonian)
  • Vuković & Runjić (Croatian)

REVIEWS AND RESOURCES

The Guardian

(18/03/2022-English)

Words without Borders

(March 2022 - English)

Kirkus Media

(15/03/2021 - English)

En attendant Nadeau

(22/06/2022 - French)

AWARDS

  • Premi Llibres Anagrama de Novel·la 2019
  • European Union Prize for Literature 2020

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