When I sing, mountains dance tour with Irene Solà in San Francisco

Spanish writer Irene Solà visits the Bay Area Book Festival to present her latest translated book “When I sing, mountains dance.”

Maja Lunde and Matsatsugo Ono will join Spanish writer Irene Solà for an in-person and live streamed conversation in the 2022 edition of The Bay Area Book Festival, as part of the series The Fierce Voice of Nature: Three Astounding Novels on Mountains, Forests, and Wild Horses. The author will present her acclaimed book, When I sing, mountains dance, in multiple events in the U.S.

The Bay Area Book Festival will take place during May 7 and 8 in Downtown Berkeley. This presentation is part of Spain Writes, America Reads, the literature program of the Cultural Office of the Embassy of Spain in Washington, D.C. that aims to support Spanish authors in the U.S.

About Irene Solà

Born in 1990 in Malla, a town north of Barcelona, Irene Solà is part of the emerging generation of Catalan writers. Her second novel, Canto jo i la muntanya balla, won the 2020 European Union Prize for Literature, the 2018 Anagrama Prize for the Novel, the Núvol Prize, and the Cálamo Prize. This March, Mara Faye Lethem’s English translation, When I Sing, Mountains Dance, is being published by Graywolf in the U.S. and Granta in the U.K.

Solà’s prose, excellently translated from the original Catalan, is expansive and tactile. Her sentences accumulate, running along, taking in as much as possible, senses alert: “When I was in the forest, far from those who carry you off and shriek, I filled my mouth with fresh sprouts and living water, and I filled my nose with all the smells, and my eyes with all the beautiful things, and I thought about my mother and my brother.”

—Christopher Shrimpton, The Guardian