Gemma Ruiz Palà

After almost three decades as a journalist specialising in cultural reporting with Televisió de Catalunya (TV3), Gemma Ruiz was deputy head of news in the final stage of her work with this channel. She made her debut as a writer in 2016 with the novel Argelagues (Gorse, Proa), a critically acclaimed bestseller about the lives of three women who, born in a farming community at the beginning of the twentieth century, must make their way to the city as workers in the textile industry, while also participating in the rearguard during the Civil War. In 2020, she published Ca la Wenling (Wenling’s, Proa) in which she offers a portrait of a woman, Wenling, who came with her family from the Chinese province of Zhejiang to open a beauty salon in the Barcelona neighbourhood of Gràcia. In 2023, she won the prestigious Sant Jordi Prize for her novel Les nostres mares (Our Mothers), a tribute to women who were born during the Franco dictatorship. The same year she stopped working as a journalist in order to work fulltime as a writer.