When I sing, mountains dance tour with Irene Solà in Washington, D.C.

Spanish writer Irene Solà visits Old Town Books in Alexandria to present her latest translated book “When I sing, mountains dance.”

Spanish writer Irene Solà presents When I sing, mountains dance at Old Town Books in an online and in-person conversation. Signed copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.

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