The list of books that speak of our beloved island is long but we have made a selection of four essential writers in order to understand Menorca through their books and thoughts; four narrators who through their pages have made this island a referent beyond its geographic limits. Ponç Pons, Pau Faner, Josep Mª Quintana and Maite Salord.
Ponç Pons, the poet
He is one of the most respected writers of our island. His pen often reflects the customs and manners of Menorca through the eyes of a person who experiences literature as an obsessive, lucid and devouring passion. Just as the author himself explains, his poetry is classical in the rhythm, modern in the expression and forceful in the content. His latest published work is Camp de Bard in which he brings together his two great passions, nature and poetry, an extensive book of poems that delves into the most authentic Menorca way of life, in love with philosophy, art and even embracing the most universal humanism.
Photograph: Diari Menorca
Pau Faner, the referent
We are before one of the writers from our island who has won most prizes. These include the Sant Jordi novel award, the Ramon Llull, the Sant Joan…, Faner has harvested all the major prizes of Catalan literature. With forty published works of novels, theatre and narrative, his latest work, L’amor del Capità Gavina, is a book inspired by the life of the sailor Jordi Farragut, father of Admiral David G. Farragut, which tells of his adventures on reaching North America in 1775.
Josep Maria Quintana, the jurist
Behind the serious gesture of this property registrar is concealed and great writer and music lover whose literary vocation has gifted Menorca one of its leading works of literature. Quintana boldly makes a novel of a long period of the island’s history through the personal vicissitudes of a Greek sailor, Iorgos Nikolaidis, with whom the reader can savour the splendid past of the port of Mahón or relive the political battles and successive conquests of the island.
Maite Salord, the lady
The current President of the Menorca Island Council is a well-known writer with a long-stranding professional career as a teacher of Catalan and literature whose cultural baggage has rewarded her with several prizes for novels, and juvenile and children’s literature. Even though her latest novel published, L’alè de les cendres, takes place in Mallorca, it represents a work of maturity by this lady of letters in Catalan that speaks to us of the Civil War and the post-war as experienced by a family.
