Eva Baltasar was born in 1978 and studied pedagogy at the University of Barcelona. She is trained as a teacher, though writing has been her central occupation since her first poetry collection, Laia, appeared in 2008 and won the Miquel de Palol Prize. She has since published further poetry volumes, many of them prize-winning, and turned to fiction with Permafrost in 2018.
Her novels are slim, first-person monologues that braid poetry into narrative. Permafrost, Boulder (2020), and Mammoth (2022) form a triptych, each following a different woman through the tensions of modern life. The recurring concerns are the body, desire, various forms of motherhood, and the friction between independence and intimacy. Baltasar writes in Catalan; her English translations, by Julia Sanches, carry the compressed, volcanic density of the originals.
Recognition has been steady. Permafrost won the 2018 Llibreter Award from Catalan booksellers and was shortlisted for France's Prix Médicis. Boulder won the 2020 Òmnium Prize for Best Novel and became the first Catalan-language book shortlisted for the International Booker Prize (2023). A fragment of Permafrost appeared in Granta. Her work has been translated into a dozen languages.
For a new reader, Boulder is the natural starting point. At just over a hundred pages it moves quickly, and its central question, what a person surrenders when they let someone into their life, lands with a force that the book's brevity only sharpens.
