The Latin American literary boom; Capital… Barcelona?
It was at least the headquarters of the agents of many of the biggest names that were part of this cultural phenomenon, and many of the greatest authors spent significant parts of their careers there.
Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, Pablo Neruda, Carlos Fuentes, Álvaro Mutis, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Isabel Allende and many more were all represented by a pioneering Catalan agent – Carmen Balcells.
In 60 years, the Carmen Balcells literary agency represented six Nobel Prize winners in literature, four of whom came from Latin America and were part of the Boom tradition: Miguel Ángel Asturias, Pablo Neruda, Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa.
“The agency is known as the Latin American Boom Agency,” Maribel Luque, who now serves as the agency’s literary director, tells Catalan News, adding that Balcells is “quite a Influence in this movement with all these authors.”
How did it come about? Where did it start? Balcells worked at Publishers Acer and Seix Barral before founding her own agency, and in these jobs she worked on contracts in Latin America and with authors from that part of the world.
“She always said it was a kind of coincidence,” says Laura Palomares, Carmen Balcells’ granddaughter, who now works at the agency her grandmother founded. Through local authors, Balcells was in touch with others in Latin America, and since the publishing industry was based in Barcelona at the time, “one author introduced her to another, then another, and then the boom came.”
“Legend has it that she started the boom. But I think she had the vision of bringing together authors from very different countries like Peru or Colombia and building literary relationships between them who had not previously considered themselves a single entity. And I think she helped with that, but obviously the boom came about on its own,” says Palomares.
But it was more than just a coincidence. Balcells had the contacts, but she also had “a very good literary instinct,” explains Maribel Luque. The “super agent,” as she was called by the Catalan writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, “had her sights set on those writers who were not yet known at the time,” says Luque. “She placed her bets and won.” As Palomares puts it: “She had a brilliant intuition that cannot be reproduced or learned.”
In addition, Balcells worked with a personal touch that helped to encourage creativity and create the conditions for some of the best writers of the 20th century to produce some of their finest works, so much so that García Márquez The Great Mother – the Big Mama.
“She charmed the writers,” Laura Palomares tells Catalan News. In her, “the writers found someone they could trust. She was not duplicitous, she was what she was, and you could see that there was truth in what she said.”
Luque says Balcells wanted to “professionalize” her clients’ careers. To do that, the agent turned the publishing industry on its head, making much more money for authors by handling contracts with publishers in a completely new way.
For the same reason, Balcells was willing to take care of her clients’ domestic affairs, or those of the children, school or whatever they needed so that it didn’t distract them from the pure writing,” explains Luque.
Balcells found apartments for her authors, helped them move across the country, and even supported them with money from her own pocket to help them make ends meet while they worked on their novels – she did everything she could to create an environment in which the talent could shine.
“I think that was the reason for their decision to move to Barcelona. And Barcelona became what it was: the epicenter of the Latin American boom,” notes Palomares.
In addition, the publishing industry was already quite strong in Barcelona and even under the Franco regime, censorship controls were relaxed as long as business was good and the country was making money.
If the authors’ topics ever drifted into politics, it was usually about the politics of their home country, many hundreds of miles away, and the anger was not directed against Franco’s regime, in which they were allowed to live and work in relative comfort.
