About
Biography
Gemma Ruiz Palà is a Catalan writer and journalist based in Barcelona. Since 2016, she has published four novels, translated into Spanish, French, Italian, and English, and has been invited to major international literary festivals including the Kolkata Literary Meet, the Buenos Aires Book Fair, the Feminism Book Fair in Rome, the Cork World Book Fest, the Hay Festival Arequipa, the Guadalajara International Book Fair, and the São Paulo Biennial. She has also been invited to international writing residencies in New York (Woodward), the UK (Exeter City of Literature), Venice (Emily Harvey Foundation), and Florida (The Studios of Key West).
Her work seeks to reclaim the twentieth century through women erased from official accounts. Her novels give voice to textile workers, Chinese manicurists, neighborhood activists, mothers, grandmothers, and caregivers. Writing in Catalan, one of Europe’s most persecuted languages, as both an artistic and political act, she explores memory, class, and gender, bringing to the forefront lives long pushed to the margins. Her novels have topped library lending lists and reading groups in Catalonia, establishing her as one of the most widely read authors in her country.
Les nostres mares, the best-selling Catalan-language book of 2023, received the Sant Jordi Prize for fiction, the most prestigious award in Catalan literature. The novel made her the first woman to win the prize after nineteen consecutive male winners. The book was also a finalist for the Todostuslibros Prize, awarded by independent bookstores across Spain.
Published work
Books
Four novels translated across several languages, each rooted in women’s experience, social history, and literary voice.
Una dona de la teva edat (A Woman Your Age)
Una dona de la teva edat follows a woman at midlife who decides she has had enough. After decades of adjusting herself to the roles expected of her, she chooses to live the second half of her life in radical opposition to the first. She leaves home, strains her relationship with her children, and returns to her long-abandoned vocation as a sculptor, until she is unexpectedly invited to the Venice Biennale.
The novel explores the physical and emotional upheavals of menopause not as decline, but as a threshold of clarity, knowledge, and creative force.
What they said
“The novel you didn’t know you were waiting for.”Eva Piquer, Catorze
“An unforgettable heroine. A riotously funny, liberating novel, and a roadmap for our future.”Alba Riera, La Turra Podcast
“Ruiz stretches Kate and her friends’ moral cause with a playful insistence, at once assertive and self-parodic, and at times deeply moving.”Bernat Puigtobella, Núvol
Les nostres mares (Our Mothers)
Les nostres mares portrays a whole generation of women born in the 1950s under Franco’s dictatorship. Through ten characters, Gemma Ruiz revisits the history of Spain from the standpoint of women’s lived experience, addressing marital consent, abortion travel to London, discriminatory laws, queer love and persecution, and neighborhood organizing to secure schools and dignity.
What they said
“Ruiz Palà manages to balance the difficult coexistence between bitterness and vulnerability, without falling into the trap of cliché.”El País
“It shows the strength and determination of women, hidden from history.”La Vanguardia
“Our Mothers tells the story of an intimate, subterranean rebellion, built up by women from previous generations in the secrets of their lives.”Tamara Tenenbaum
“Everyone should have the right to experience Gemma Ruiz Palà and her explosive literature. The women’s voices in this book sing in chorus, never missing a chance to celebrate life with joyful feminist exuberance.”Katixa Agirre
Ca la Wenling (Wenling’s)
Ca la Wenling tells the story of a friendship born out of migration. A Chinese manicurist settles in Barcelona to build a better future for her children, where she meets a documentary filmmaker researching manicure and the power relations within nail salons. The novel explores gender, race, and class, while revealing the beauty salon as a place of care, sisterhood, and refuge.
What they said
“In a certainly idealized but respectful way, it updates the view of a multicultural neighborhood and offers the story of a friendship.”La Vanguardia
“I’d dare to venture that Ca la Wenling will be a major contemporary novel, because of its themes (women, immigration, work), its perspective on these matters, deeply rooted in its feminism, and the style in which it is written.”La Lectora Literary Magazine
“The exploration of a foreign character, unheard of in Catalan literature, carried out from the most radical linguistic genuineness.”Núvol Magazine
“Ruiz has written a necessary, feminist and anti-racist novel.”Mille Splendidi Libri
Argelagues (Gorse)
Argelagues is a story of industrialization and the Spanish Civil War told in the voices of working-class women left out of the official account. Through three women characters, the novel traces the changing conditions of life in the turbulent twentieth century: the shift from rural to urban life, strategies for combatting hunger during the war, repression, and resilience after Franco’s victory.
What they said
“Gemma Ruiz has taken us totally by surprise with her literary debut. An extraordinary, almost perfect first novel.”El Mundo
“Ruiz’s novel is intense in its ability to capture the reader’s attention, yet wise enough to move carefully and sensitively so that it is never tiring to read.”El País
“A unique book in today’s Catalan literary landscape.”Jordi Puntí
“The truth of a story lived in the raw.”Pere Gimferrer
“A rich, expressive, and powerful language, what an achievement to sustain it so vividly across nearly 400 pages.”Najat El Hachmi, El Periódico
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Instagram: @gemmaruizpala
Contact
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