Joan Vinyoli

His father died when he was four years old and his childhood was marked by the straitened economic circumstances of his family and the happiness of the summers he spent in Santa Coloma de Farners, a landscape he frequently evoked in his poetry.

He did Business Studies and, at sixteen years of age, began to work in the publishing house Labor, where he occupied different positions until his retirement in 1979.Initially unsure of his vocation and self-taught, Vinyoli conceived of poetry much as Carles Riba did, as a tool of inquiry and self-knowledge, a way of finding about the world and a form of spiritual realisation.

Poetry was, for Vinyoli, a way of becoming rooted in reality and also of transcending it, and the optimal means of salvation, for overcoming the state of indigence that he believed was inherent to the human condition.

In 1963, after seven years of silence, during which, however, he wrote the first version of Llibre d'amic, Joan Vinyoli published Realitats, an irregular and heterogeneous work in which the poet vacillates between remaining true to the poetic postulates that govern the writing of El Callat and taking up the model of realist and engaged poetry that was prevalent at the time in Catalonia.

The second stage, from 1970 to 1984, is that of his maturity and poetic plenitude, coinciding with the point of maximum recognition from critics (with prizes, reviews, poetry readings, etcetera) and public alike.