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”.
Luna Lunera is a devastating account of tyranny in the 40s, when the cruel values of the dictatorship are reproduced within the family. La Canción de Dorotea tells the story of a biology teacher who inherits a house in the Empordà region of Catalonia and encounters a conspiracy of rural silence, evasion and deceit.
Regàs was born in Barcelona. Her mother, Mariona Pagès, spoke five languages and at the time of the Spanish republic (1931-39) translated Latin classics into Catalan. Her father, Xavier Regàs, was a playwright and journalist.
The civil war of 1936-39 wrecked this cultured, liberal family. Rosa and her three siblings were sent to safety in Vence, France. At the end of the conflict, both parents lived in exile in France, then her father was interned in a French concentration camp, while the children returned to live in Barcelona with their religious, authoritarian grandfather.
Rosa was sent to boarding school with Dominican nuns. After Mariona returned to Spain, the Tribunal de Menores (children’s court) permitted visits to her daughter only once a month, always in the presence of two policemen and an official who noted down the conversation. Mother and daughter were not allowed to touch.
This harsh, abusive childhood is recorded in her finest novel, Luna Lunera. I asked her once whether the novel really was autobiographical. “Totally,” she replied. She escaped by marrying in 1951, aged 17, which meant that, under the laws of the dictatorship, she passed from the control of her grandfather to that of her husband, Eduard Omedes, a photographer. Luckily, though Catholic and conservative, her husband was supportive.
They separated in the 60s and later divorced. They had five children, Anna, Eduard, David, Mariona and Loris (the last two were twins).
In 1959 Regàs entered the University of Barcelona to study philosophy and letters. Graduating in 1964, she worked in the press department of the publisher Seix Barral until 1970, when she founded her own publishing house, La Gaya Ciencia (“Joyful Knowledge”). She produced a series of popular short, pocket-size books to explain basic political concepts, often written by leading anti-Franco figures, such as Felipe González, the future prime minister.
After selling La Gaya Ciencia in 1983, Regàs worked as a translator for the United Nations in Geneva, New York and Nairobi until 1994, when she settled in the Costa Brava village of Llofriu and devoted herself to writing and to creating a family environment that she had been denied. There was an interlude when she became head of Spain’s National Library in 2004. Appointed by the Socialist party, she opened the library to the general public, not just to researchers, but left in acrimony in 2007.
This was not her only public conflict. She was widely attacked by independence activists for signing the Foro Babel manifesto, which denied that the Spanish state undermined Catalan rights and which opposed special measures to defend the Catalan language. “Nationalism is the most dangerous poison,” she averred.
Her Diario de una Abuela de Verano (2004, Diary of a Summer Grandmother) was an account of her summers hosting at Llofriu as many as 17 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. The book was adapted into a successful television series. A final novel, Música de Cámara (Chamber Music, 2013 – winner of the Biblioteca Breve prize), returned to the sombre postwar period. In her last decade she wrote four volumes of autobiography in Catalan – her other books are in Spanish – the last of which, Un Llegat: L’Aventura de la Vida (A Legacy: The Adventure of Life), was published two months before her death.
Full of vitality, Regàs fought hard for what she believed in. She was proud to belong to a republican family. “We were the losers, but I have never felt inferior,” she said.
She is survived by her children.
• Rosa Regàs i Pagès, writer, publisher and translator, born 11 November 1933; died 17 July 2024
