Àngel Guimerà

Àngel Guimerà (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 1845 - Barcelona, 1924) was a playwright and poet who wrote mainly in Catalan, although he was born in the Canary Islands to a Catalan father and a Canarian mother. He is considered one of the leading figures of the Renaixença, the movement that revived Catalan as a literary language in the late nineteenth century. His significance lies in how far his plays travelled: he became one of the most performed dramatists of his time, both in Spain and abroad.

The family moved to Catalonia when he was a child and settled in El Vendrell, his father's home town, though Guimerà spent long periods in Barcelona, where he was schooled in Spanish. A friend from El Vendrell introduced him to Catalan. He began as a poet, but his gift for drama brought him recognition, and by the late 1870s his verse plays had made him the most important Catalan-language dramatist of his generation.

His greatest success came with the prose dramas of the 1890s. His style blends romantic sensibility with the close observation of everyday life associated with realism, and his themes include the weight of tradition, social inequality, honour and guilt. Terra baixa, written in 1896, became his best-known play: it was translated into many languages, inspired operas and was adapted several times for the cinema.

Guimerà was also active in public life. He took part in the Catalanist political movement, belonged to the first Catalanist association and led cultural bodies such as the Ateneu in Barcelona, where he gave the inaugural address in Catalan. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature many times without winning it. His legacy rests on his role in building a theatre in Catalan and on the memory of his birthplace, where a theatre bears his name.