Carmen balcells Biography

Carmen Balcells

(Santa Fe de Segarra, Lleida, 1930-Barcelona, ​​2015) Spanish literary agent who with her innovative management radically modified the market for hiring, promoting and publishing books in the Spanish language.

Carmen Balcells

Born into a family of rural owners, she studied business expertise and at the age of twenty-four she settled in Barcelona with her family, where she worked as a secretary until that her friend Joaquim Sabrià recommended her to the exiled Romanian writer Vintila Horia, owner of the literary agency ACER, administrator of foreign authors for Spain.

In this agency he began to work as a correspondent until, in 1960, Vintila Horia won the Goncourt Prize and moved to Paris.Carmen Balcells then decided to establish herself on her own: she founded her own literary agency in the rental apartment where she lived, and in a few years she revolutionized the international map of publishing.Meanwhile, in 1961 she had married Luis Palomares, with whom she had her only son three years later: Luis Miguel.

The Carmen Balcells Literary Agency began by managing the translation rights of foreign authors.When Carlos Barral, literary director of Seix Barral, commissioned her to manage the foreign rights of their authors, Carmen realized that a literary agent should not represent a publisher before another publisher, but rather authors against publishers.In this way, the authors would sign the contracts, and the conditions of those contracts would be discussed by the publishers with the agent.

At the dawn of the boom of Latin American literature, Balcells had the idea of ​​selling the rights of Latin American and Spanish authors abroad.The beginning of the success is linked to the name of the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, whose rights he managed since the early 1960s.He would be followed by an overwhelming list of writers: Mario Vargas Llosa, Juan Carlos Onetti, Julio Cortázar, José Donoso, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Camilo José Cela, Eduardo Mendoza or Isabel Allende.

With authors of the boom : García Márquez, Jorge Edwards, Vargas Llosa, José Donoso and Ricardo Muñoz Suay

The writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, a great friend of the agent and one of her clients, once defined her as the "literary superagent who will go down in the history of universal literature for her Promethean endeavor of stealing authors from publishers in order to build their status as free writers on the free market.Until Carmen Balcells, writers signed lifetime contracts with publishers, received agonizing payoffs, and sometimes received gifts in kind, for example, a jersey or a Stilton cheese.[...] Before footballers got it, Balcells limited writers' lien and helped publishers uncover good intentions, stifled by a misunderstood sense of the trade."

If Manuel Vázquez Montalbán gave her the name of "literary superagent", it was the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and future Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez who called her for the first time "Big Mom." Her personality overwhelming, her sensitivity and her personalized treatment with the writers contributed to the creation of an extraordinary complicity between the authors and the literary agent.Balcells, generously but firmly, always did everything possible so that the authors did not have to live burdened, delivering a novel in any way every six months, or every year, in order to reach the end of the month.

In the seventies he set up RBA, a publishing services company, with Ricardo Rodrigo and Roberto Altarriba (RBA are the initials d e Rodrigo, Balcells and Altarriba).She left it when her two partners entered Planeta-DeAgostini as directors because they had to choose between the agency and RBA.

In 1999 Carmen Balcells received the medal for cultural merit awarded by the Barcelona City Council; a year later, on May 26, King Juan Carlos I awarded him the gold medal for Merit in Fine Arts.It was then, in her seventies, when she made her retirement public, "to continue ruling but without having to get up early," as she herself said.

The truth is that in her office in the Ensanche de Barcelona continued to receive and advise writers, editors and politicians.The retreat did not materialize in a practical way; In this regard, his writer-friend Mario Vargas Llosa jokingly said on one occasion from Lima: "Let no one breathe while Balcells breathes!", paraphrasing the slogan that the former president of the Dominican Republic Joaquín Balaguer used when he wanted to continue to command his country.

In 2004 Balcells created the company Barcelona Latinitatis Patria, which promoted the project of creating in Barcelona "a monumental building that contains the manuscripts, archives and personal libraries of great writers and publishers.A kind of great a reading center [...] where everything would be digitized, with a bookstore where, thanks to the "print-on-demand" technique, the reader could purchase any book, even if it was out of print, in single-copy runs ".Another initiative promoted by the agent was the company Barcelona Ad Libitum, dedicated to representing musicians.And he still had time to advise the young creators of a new Barcelona publishing house, Alpha Decay, which has recently appeared.

In 2005, Balcells was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University Autónoma de Barcelona (UAB) in recognition of his career in the publishing world.His appointment was decided by the university's governing board by an "overwhelming majority".

In September 2006 he was awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi and a month later, on November 14, he received in Barcelona the 2006 Montblanc Prize for Women, for being the main promoter of the boom of Latin American literature and, in the words of the jury, for having become "a leading personality in the last fifty years in narrative of the Spanish language, contributing to its expansion and recognition, consolidating literary careers and discovering new values, among which are several Cervantes and Nobel prizes ".