Olga Xirinacs i Díaz

Her creative career encompasses poetry, short stories, novels, diaries, travel literature, literature for children and young people. It is collected in more than eighty volumes. The craft of writing has led her to experiment, to reflect on reality, to document herself on various and delicate subjects. Her work is conscientiously crafted with an exquisite word and an elegance of style.

She is able to capture our attention through the senses, through experiences whether undergone or not, and through the diverse and deep search for elements of all kinds. She makes us breathe a time and a world from a human point of view, from the point of view of a writer committed to her time. Writing and reading is a unitary experience that brings us closer to listening to the writer's inner music while discovering the settings and characters in a portrait where thought, poetry and painting merge in a desire to find the inner beauty of the world around us.

Olga Xirinacs, faithful to the beliefs of the great writers, praises the word and teaches it to us in her poems and prose, thus in the preface of the poem collection Tangerine Segments  (May 2004) she tells us that:

"The word is as stubborn as life, and as fragile. The word always takes place between silences. it needs these silences. What is not known is whether it is born from an empty space or a full space. Cao Xingjian, who wrote at length, says he ended up "appreciating the inherent pleasure in the empty spaces between two periods of disorder." Then I ask myself, I investigate,  whether the word starts from disorder and when it finds the void it becomes poetry. (...) We can choose, and that's what  poets do when they write their moments. Neither forced, nor pressured, the poet is free to interpret the world. Their world and their time. A fragment of this world that goes from the unknown universe to the smallest particle. The strange thing is that they still find love in it. We can ask ourselves what moves the world: love or heartbreak? Even if there is eternity, as Seamus Heaney wanted, this question will not be answered. (...) I appreciate the hospitality of those who granted me the word."

The urban landscape and sense of Tarragona is linked to the work of Xirinacs in all its facets. In the prologue he dedicated to her in the poem collection Blue Code, Josep Anton Baixeras emphasized that "Olga Xirinacs' loyalty to a cultural heritage, to a history, to a people; and more immediately, to a provincial city, to a sense of art, to a popular experience of that heritage -also in the parental sense of this word-; Olga's admirable loyalty to a lineage of ideal aristocracies is a reality so everyday, transparent and sharp, that it could even seem, at times, banal".