Ironic, scathing, but also committed and passionate Majorcan writer Maria Antònia Oliver Cabrer, who died yesterday in Manacor at the age of 75, leaves a deep void in Catalan letters, not only for her work, but also for what she represents as a writer who belonged to a generation that was increasingly further apart in time and who was key in normalizing literature in Catalan by writing unapologetically on all subjects and in all formats.
The name of Maria Antònia Oliver is inseparable from that of Ophelia Dracs, a literary group that she joined with her husband and accomplice, the writer James Fuster, and whose vocation was to extend Catalan as a literary language to genres never before created, such as crime novels, erotica, horror or science fiction. Thus, he was part of a generation of authors —Quim Monzó, Pep Albanell, Joaquim Carbó, Quim Soler, Biel Mesquida, among others— aware of national reconstruction in the seventies and convinced of the fundamental role that language and literature should play in this process. Some of the successes of this literary experiment today are classics: ‘Deu pometes té el pomer’ (1980), ‘Lovecraft, Lovecraft’ (1981), ‘Negra i consentida’ (1983) and ‘Boccato di cardinali’ (1985 ).
Her career as a writer stands out for the versatility, since he not only wrote fiction, but also He wrote the script for television and radio, children’s and youth literature, essays, reports, theater and translation, first to Spanish and then to Catalan. In this last field, there is considered the canonical translator into Catalan of Virginia Woolf, although he also covered Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson or Herman Melville. His version of ‘Moby Dick’ won the Translation Prize of the Generalitat de Catalunya in 1985.
It stands out from his work, forged with an agile and lively language, and traversed by the search for freedom, the creation of the character Lònia Guiu, the first female detective in Catalan literature. Guiu had already made his first appearance in ‘Negra i consentida’, by the Ofèlia Dracs collective, but he will take on the lead role in ‘Estudi en lila’ (1985), signed by Oliver. He will later appear in other titles such as ‘Antípodes’ (1988) and ‘El sol que fa l’ànec’ (1994). exactly the Editorial La Magrana He has just reissued this first title in the Guiu series, proof of the interest his work still arouses. Without forgetting the novel ‘Crineres de foc’ (1985); ‘Joana E.’ (1992), with which she won the Prudenci Bertrana; ‘Moon Carvings’ (2000); or the short narrative work ‘Colors de mar’ (2007), and plays such as ‘Negroni de ginebra’ (1991). His works have been translated into Spanish, English, German, French, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch.
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Oliver’s literary vocation is early and At only 23 years old he published his first novel ‘Crònica d’un mig estiu’ in which he conveys a critique of the transformations that Mallorca is undergoing in the hands of speculation. As a result of this work, which Club Editor published in 1970 in Barcelona, where Oliver went to live, he met the writer Jaume Fuster, with whom he shared life and literature, until his premature death in 1998, when he was only 53 years old. When in February 2016 he received the Honor Award of Catalan Letters, a combative and feminist Maria Antònia Oliver, recognized that she had stopped writing for a long time, dejected above all by the loss of her partner and also by health problems. Outside the literary circuit in recent years, Oliver was nevertheless recognized with various awards throughout her life, such as the Creu de Sant Jordi for her career as a writer in 2007, the Jaime Fuster Award of the Association of Writers in the Catalan Language in 2004 or previously on Ramon Llull Award of the Balearic Government in 2003.