ESCENARIS

According to him, there's no corruption among the starseverything there is made of fire, pure and disinfected. It must be because they're so far away, I think. But still, even if that's the reason, he's right.

I carry words, I take them for a walk. They grow in the mountains, breathe in the open fields, dissolve at the horizon, soak themselves in rivers and reservoirs. I try to reconnect my language with the world, to recharge this half-dead tongue. Once, actors sought out pronunciation by visiting villages. Now it's better not to get out of the car, so I look for expressiveness by darkening the language in tunnels and letting it take flight on bridges, cooling it in the snow and salting it by the coast.

I burn my sentences as if I were smoking them. I inhale the landscape to set them alight. I roll down the windows and recite with the scent of soil and wheat after the harvest, with the bitterness of burnt leaves, with the heavy air before a summer storm. I expose the words to lightning, bury them, scorch them in the sun, pierce them with the charred branches left by a forest fire, feed them to the animals. I industrialize them, turn them into factory lots, stain them in landfills and sacrifice them in slaughterhouses; I drag them through the dirt, leave them to soak, as my father once did with salt cod.

Toni Sala was born in Sant Feliu de Guíxols in 1969. He has written for newspapers and published short story collections, novels, chronicles, and essays. With Els nois (L'Altra, 2014) "Absolutely brilliant," Kirkus Reviews; "A master of meditation," Publishers Weekly he inaugurated the catalogue of L'Altra Editorial, and with El cas Pujol (L'Altra, 2014 -- winner of the 2014 City of Barcelona Prize) he became the first name in their non fiction list.

His novel Persecució (L'Altra, 2019) won the prestigious Crexells Prize for the best Catalan novel of the year. In 2025 he publishes Escenaris (L'Altra, 2025), the end of his Trilogy of Evil.