I am drawn to twentieth-century Spanish history. My first novel, Celia’s Room, set in 1990, describes a particular moment I lived through: Barcelona’s transformation from a greyish Franco town into the designer urbs that hosted the 1992 Olympic Games. It was a city where young people were still ecstatic with the possibilities that other western countries had experimented with in earlier cultural revolutions: sex, drugs and loud Flamenco shirts.
I am currently working on my second novel, also set in Barcelona and other parts of Spain, which covers the period 1906-40.
Purchase Celia’s Room here.
The Pylons
The secret of these hills was stone, and cottages
Of that stone made,
And crumbling roads
That turned on sudden hidden villages
Now over these small hills, they have built the concrete
That trails black wire
Pylons, those pillars
Bare like nude giant girls that have no secret.
The valley with its gilt and evening look
And the green chestnut
Of customary root,
Are mocked dry like the parched bed of a brook.
But far above and far as sight endures
Like whips of anger
With lightning’s danger
There runs the quick perspective of the future.
This dwarfs our emerald country by its trek
So tall with prophecy
Dreaming of cities
Where often clouds shall lean their swan-white neck.
Stephen Spender, 1933.
