About Josep Pla
Josep Pla i Casadevall (Catalan pronunciation: [ʒuˈzɛp ˈpla]; 8 March 1897 – 23 April 1981) was a Spanish journalist and a popular author. As a journalist he worked in France, Italy, Britain, Germany, and the Soviet Union, from where he wrote political and cultural chronicles in Catalan and Spanish. He is somewhat controversial for present day Catalans. On the one hand, his prose is widely acknowledged as the finest standard of contemporary literature in Catalan, but on the other hand, his ties to Francoist Spain are often frowned upon, though nowadays this is usually disregarded. He continued travelling through Europe (France, the Soviet Union, Britain), and in 1925 he published his first book, Coses Vistes which was a great success and sold out in a week. In April 1931, on the same morning as the proclamation of the Republic of Spain, he was invited to Madrid by Cambó as parliamentary correspondent of La Veu and became a witness to the first days of the Republic.
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