» Gaziel Award 2011 of Biographies and Memoirs

Terenci Moix was one of the most-read and best-loved authors of his age. He started out as an enfant terrible who revolutionised the Catalan literary scene with the publication of seven books (novels with a fiery eroticism that also took a long, hard look at the Catalan middle classes, while documenting the ‘pop generation’ the author belonged to).

However, he ended up as the author whose Egypt novels remained at the top of the best-seller lists for months. How did be move from being an avant-garde writer to a commercial one? What’s more, his life was full of extravagant, impassioned, almost implausible episodes and formidable cities: London in the Swinging Sixties, Paris before May 1968, and a Rome in which Moix counted Pasolini as a lover and people like Rafael Alberti and Elsa Morante as friends, and where he discovered that the true avant-garde was to be found in the classical world.

Juan Bonilla searches for Moix in his books, in accounts from those who knew him, in the cities he spent time in, from his childhood as a spoilt little boy in the Raval neighbourhood of Barcelona to his later years when a smoking-related disease prevented him from taking more than ten steps in a row, and rehabilitates the figure of a writer who is in no way merely the super-seller he became, and whose power as a writer – obscured by his own spectacular life-story – remains as fresh as it was at the outset.