Montserrat Roig

Montserrat Roig i Fransitorra
Born	June 13, 1946(1946-06-13) Barcelona
Died	November 10, 1991(1991-11-10) (aged 45) Barcelona
Occupation	Writer
Nationality	Catalan
Period	Late XXth century
Genres	Novels, short stories, essays
Notable award(s)	Premi Victor Català for Molta roba i poc sabó... i tan neta que la volen (1970) Premi Sant Jordi de novel·la for El temps de les cireres (1976) Premi Crítica Serra d'Or for Els catalans als camps nazis (1978) Premi Nacional de Literatura Catalana d'assaig for L'agulla daurada (1986)
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Montserrat Roig i Fransitorra (Barcelona, June 13, 1946 - November 10, 1991 was a catalan writer of novels, short stories and articles.^[1][2]

Biography

She was born in 1946 in Barcelona, to a liberal, middle-class family, living at the right side of the Eixample. Her father, Tomàs Roig i Llop, was a lawyer and a writer.

She was very young when she started to participate in student protest movements that were organized during the last years of Franco's regime. In 1968 she got her degree in philosophy and literature, and received her PhD in 1970.^[1] She was also a Catalan Reader in Bristol during the academic year 1972-1973. From 1971 onwards -when she won the Victor Català prize for Molta roba i poc sabó... i tan neta que la volen, a compilation of short stories- she dedicated herself to literature. She began a literary cycle composed by works such as Ramona adéu (1972), which portraits three generations of women -grandmother, mother and daughter- who live their own stories with Catalonia's key historic moments as a background, or El temps de les cireres (1977), starring the same characters, for which Roig received the "Premi Sant Jordi de novel·la" in 1976.^[2]

Her work as a journalist is also remarkable, a position from which she manifests her will to build a tradition of cultured, feminist journalism^[2] and willing to recover the historic memory of her country. Roig gained popularity thanks to the interviews she later published in a book series known as Retrats paral·lels (1975 and 1976). Another work which obtained wide renown was Els catalans als camps nazis (1977), "Crítica Serra d'Or" prize, and an exceptional attesting document. In 1977 she got a job as a journalist in the catalan division of Televisión Española, where she produced a program called Personatges, consisting of a series of interviews, which is also the name of a series of two books where she published them.

L'hora violeta (1980) is the novel which culminates her feminist positioning. From then on, her novels took a different turn. Later, she publishes L'òpera quotidiana (1982), La veu melodiosa (1987) and a compilation of short stories with the title El cant de la joventut (1989). Among her most prizewinning works, L'agulla daurada (1985) stands out (National Prize of Catalan Literature in 1986), inspired by a two-month stay the author undertook in Leningrad and which shows the siege by the nazis the city underwent during World War II.^[2] The last of her publications was Digues que m'estimes encara que sigui mentida (1991), where she conveys personal poetry as a literary will.

Montserrat Roig was a member of the Association of Catalan Language Writers (Associació d'Escriptors en Llengua Catalana) and vice-president of the Junta Territorial del Principat de Catalunya (Territorial Committee of the Catalan Principality) (1989–1990).^[2] She died in Barcelona in 1991 due to breast cancer.

Works

• Molta roba i poc sabó... i tan neta que la volen, 1970
• Ramona, adéu, 1972
• El temps de les cireres, 1977
• Els catalans als camps nazis, 1977
• L'hora violeta, 1980
• ¿Tiempo de mujer? 1980
• L'Òpera quotidiana, 1982
• L'agulla daurada, National Prize of Catalan Literature (1986), 1985
• La veu melodiosa, 1987
• El cant de la joventut, 1989
• Reivindicació de la senyora Clito Mestres (play), 1990
• Digues que m'estimes encara que sigui mentida, 1991

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Enciclopèdia Catalana, Montserrat Roig at Enciclopèdia Catalana (Catalan Encyclopedia).
2. ^ ^{a b c d e} escriptors.cat

External links

• Biography by UOC (Catalan) (Spanish) (English)
• Website of the TV show NOMS, in TV3 (Catalan)

Persondata
Name	Roig Fransitorra, Montserrat
Alternative names
Short description	Writer
Date of birth	June 13, 1946
Place of birth	Barcelona, Spain
Date of death	November 10, 1991
Place of death	Barcelona, Spain