The publisher and novelist Rosa Regàs, who has died aged 90, was a major cultural figure in Spain for more than half a century. Outspoken, always “doing what I wanted whenever I could”, Regàs blazed a trail for women resisting the Franco dictatorship (1939-1975). She became central to the leftist, artistic, hedonist movement of 1960s Barcelona known as the “gauche divine”, revolving around Bocaccio, the nightclub launched by her brother Oriol in 1967.
Regàs’s most lasting achievements are the three excellent novels she wrote when in her 60s, Azul (Blue, 1994 – winner of the Nadal prize), Luna Lunera (Moony Moon, 1999) and La Canción de Dorotea (Dorothy’s Song, 2001 – winner of the Planeta prize). Azul describes the affair of an upper-class married woman and a younger, less cultured man. In Regàs’s words, it deals with “the dependencies created by love relationships”.
