Although in his youth he started writing in Spanish, seen at that time as the language for cultural purposes, he soon swifted to his mother tongue influenced by major poet Jacint Verdaguer —whom he met personally— and participated in the literary life of Barcelona, Blanes, Girona and Olot, becoming winner of many Floral Games contests (Jocs florals) in the 1890s–1900s and collaborating in several Catalanist magazines and newspapers (La Renaixença, La Veu de Catalunya, Joventut and others).

Ruyra cultivated many different genres such as narrative, poetry, drama, essay and literary criticism, but he is best known by the short stories included in the volumes Marines i boscatges (Seascapes and Woodland Scenes, 1903), which was some years later extended and republished as Pinya de rosa (The End Knot, 1920), and also La parada (The Trap, 1919).

Some of these stories have been translated to Spanish, English, French, German and Italian[4] and have been compared with writings by Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Ernest Hemingway.

[6] Nowadays Ruyra's memory is fondly remembered in his hometown Blanes, where the Town Hall promotes a multilingual literary route that explores different sites that inspired and feature in his short stories, such as the shipyards, the cove of Sa Forcanera or the Sanctuary of El Vilar.

Since 1963, the Enciclopèdia Catalana Foundation and La Galera publishing house award the Joaquim Ruyra Prize of young adult fiction during the Nit de Santa Llúcia ("Saint Lucy's Night"), one of the most important cultural events related to Catalan-language literature.