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The London Magazine Catalan Issue is out now
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A note on our Catalan issue:
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Dearest reader,
On the morning of the 23 April 2015 I emerged from my flat on the edge of El Raval and began to walk in the direction of Plaça de Catalunya. Earlier that year I had relocated to Barcelona to live and work and, in an effort to familiarise myself with the city, had gotten into the habit of going on long walks. That day, I remember passing the sprawling, iron-framed market of Sant Antoni, which I had watched being renovated week by week over the winter, and feeling pleasantly detached from any of the customs and establishments of my own native language and culture. It was the kind of gratifying alienation familiar to anyone fortunate enough to live abroad by choice. As I walked, I doubt I had any awareness of the significance of the date back in England. Nor did I have any notion that Saint George, or rather Sant Jordi, was also the patron saint of Catalonia.
When I reached La Rambla, I was surprised to see the early signs of the day’s festivities: book- and rose-covered tables running all the way down to the port, couples out walking together before lunch, the spring light making long, angled shadows in streets that were – now I took the time to notice – unusually, unmistakably red. There was red on tablecloths draped over the stalls, on the covers of books, on people’s clothes and on flags lining the balconies of the apartment buildings. If I squinted, I could make out two faint columns of red stretching in both directions, down towards the sea and up the slope along Passeig de Gràcia.
Where in England Saint George’s Day had long felt like the preserve of the fringes, here I was quickly learning that was not the case. If in England nation-building was a presupposed force, something more or less unassailable and therefore hardly worth celebrating or preserving at all, the context for Sant Jordi in Catalonia was far more complex.
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Sant Jordi, 2025
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For our English readers, at least, it may be helpful to have a brief reminder of the legend itself. In the city of Silene, Libya, a fierce dragon is terrorising the local population when George arrives on his travels, proselytising. To keep the creature from ravaging the city, the inhabitants feed it two sheep each day, but when the sheep are no longer enough, they are forced to sacrifice people. Eventually the king’s daughter is selected. At this point, George intervenes and slays the dragon, after which the entire city immediately converts to Christianity. In the Catalan version the events are said to have taken place in the town of Montblanc, near Tarragona, and include one crucial addition: a rose bush, grown out of the dead dragon’s blood, from which Jordi picks a red rose to offer to the princess.
Almost a millennium after the supposed events of this myth, Christian armies across Europe began adopting George as their protector. His cross, seen as a unifying symbol for international Christian militia, was embroidered on the left hand side of soldiers’ tunics, right above the heart. In Catalonia the first evidence of that cult spreading more widely appears in the thirteenth century. By around 1427 the Palau de la Generalitat was already hosting a rose fair, and in 1456 the Catalan parliament formally named Jordi patron saint of Catalonia, institutionalising the annual giving of roses.
Several centuries later, and entirely by coincidence, the 23 April would acquire another significance. In 1926, at the request of the Spanish parliament, King Alfonso XIII signed a decree establishing the 7 October as ‘Book Day’, chosen because it was believed to be the birthday of Miguel de Cervantes. Five years later, in 1931, this time at the request of booksellers, the celebration was moved to the 23 April. In Catalonia this new ‘Book Day’ happened to coincide with Sant Jordi, and the two traditions fused. Since then the day has been marked by the exchange of books and roses.
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With the new issue and tote bag bundle, save 20% on the cost of the Catalan Issue 2026 and the bespoke TLM tote.
The latest issue includes Marina Garcés on Catalan flags and nation states, Oriol Ponsatí-Murlà on the advent of photography and documenting the dead, and artwork by Mari Chordà and Àngels Ribé.
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When I returned to Barcelona for Sant Jordi last year, this time as a magazine editor, I was more keenly aware of the day’s reputation as a publishing success story. The numbers alone are enough to make envious editors or doomsayers of England’s increasing illiteracy either seethe or see themselves as vindicated. In 2025 €26 million in sales were linked to Sant Jordi alone, including two million individual books. Almost ten per cent of all books sold in Catalonia across an entire year are sold on this day, along with roughly a third of all roses.
It would be easy to see this as evidence only of effective local government or publisher marketing, but the reality in Catalonia is, obviously, more fraught. The modern history of the language is inseparable from its suppression: under Franco, Catalan was banned from public life, education and publishing, its use confined largely to the private sphere, and its re-emergence and legitimisation since the transition to democracy has not suddenly healed all wounds. If rising illiteracy is already perceived as a struggle for a country speaking English, with roughly two billion speakers globally, how does that same problem manifest for the speakers, writers and readers of Catalan, who number somewhere around ten million and for whom minority status and a history of oppression exist within living memory?
In 2006 Catalonia was finally granted ‘nation’ status. That is until Spain’s Constitutional Court struck down portions of the autonomy statute, ruling that Catalans constituted a ‘nationality’ but that Catalonia was not, itself, a nation. In the middle of all this legal wrangling, another problem emerges. In the same way national book days attempt to promote the literature of a certain region, magazine issues themed around a nation are supposed to do the same. But how does one evaluate the literature of a whole language, if not technically a nation? Any literature is, by definition, heterogeneous. It is diverse in its character and content, and more than that, it is pluralistic: there is no zero-sum game of style or form and most of us, when our literary ambitions are reduced to their most basic terms, are chasing the same end goal, the same thrill.
Even more difficult is the idea that a single issue of a magazine might somehow represent that variegated corpus. Should you focus on the current moment or on the defining work of previous generations that has had time to establish itself? Should you select work that functions best in translation, or simply writing that conforms most closely to your own taste? And in any case, how should all this writing sit together, especially across different genres?
One thing that seems clear on the evidence of this issue is that if Catalan literature is to be considered nationalist, it should also be considered equally, if not more so, internationalist. There is no sense here of a group of writers content to look inwards, nor of a purely defensive instinct towards preservation or conservation. Indeed, there is a palpable sense of Catalan intellectual history being made to converse naturally with universal authors and events. And while certain themes – or indeed dates – reappear (the repercussions of the referendum and declaration of independence in October 2017 – itself part of a much longer historical tension – loom large), there is also a huge variety in style and form, setting and colour.
The pieces gathered here move across the cities and landscapes of Catalonia – Barcelona, Girona, the Costa Brava – but also far beyond them: we are taken to the Paseo del Prado in Madrid; to the pirate-infested waters of the eighteenth-century Mediterranean; to England and a Kensington bookshop just streets away from where this magazine is published; to North Africa, Napoleon’s France, and back to the nightclubs of Barcelona and the narrow streets of El Raval.
On the level of form and subject matter, there is lyric poetry so epigrammatic that lines consist of a single syllable, alongside epic poems that blend the prosaic experience of the contemporary with Pushkin and the Ancients. There is writing that traces Hegel’s spiralling attempts to universalise the history of human thought, as well as pieces about that uniquely Catalan notion of seny and rauxa; of level-headedness and impetuosity.
But as with the best writing anywhere, in any language, the moments of true recognition rarely arrive through the broadest or most ambitious claims. It is the most specific details that somehow become the most universal. Like the image of Hegel sat by the fire, furiously writing, nearly destitute, as his mistress’s belly grows and grows. Or the scene in which a couple attempt to preserve the memory of their dead child with a photograph; of a Catalan man suffering through a London Book Fair panel without a word of English; the misfortunes of a fruit seller in Barcelona plagued by overtourism; a footballer’s homecoming to Camp Nou; a lopsided open-relationship; a delayed meeting; the fluorescent lights of a public laundry – each comes to stand for something larger, to be, in the same way that all the great novels and poetry are, about everybody.
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As Marina Garcés writes in the essay that opens this issue, the aspiration is for a Catalonia ‘where there is no ban on hanging clothes from balconies and where it is not mandatory to hang flags from official buildings, a [place] where colours have no homeland and where identities do not delimit nations.’ As well as being a political statement, it also functions as a kind of artistic one. Literature, after all, is one of the few places where such borders can still dissolve entirely. The stories, poems, essays and art here speak to us as if we ourselves are implicated in their moments, like they are our own memories. When I look at the photograph on this issue’s cover, I can recall the first time I saw that very block of flats on one of my long walks: the clothes drying on the line, the tree that every afternoon has its shadow outlined on the wall. Or at least that feels like a memory of mine. It could just as easily have happened to anybody else, or maybe to everybody, which is exactly the point.
Best wishes,
Jamie
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Imaging the Invisible
By Oriol Ponsatí-Murlà
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On Not Knowing English
By Sergi Pàmies
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Flags Made in China
By Marina Garcés
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