I was born in the Berguedà region, on a Sunday, Carnival time, in 1944. I know it was just before Lent because when I was a little girl I loved dressing up and my godmother always used to say: anyone can see you were born at Carnival time!

When I was just six months old, my parents moved to a textile colony where they were offered work, a home, a crèche for their children and a plot of land to cultivate.

It was a good offer, bearing in mind that here in Catalonia we were subjected to a dictatorship and all the poverty, rationing and smuggling that came with it. And the rest of Europe was caught up in the most brutal war of the twentieth century.

In spite of everything, I have no memory of my parents complaining or looking dour at the time. On the contrary, their gratitude was plainly visible. The paternalism inculcated by the factory owners had taken root and most of the people living in the industrial colonies believed them in good faith, to the point that they agreed to their taking over the children’s education. The motto was that you have survive, even at the price of hocking your children’s future and freedom. And we, the children, were happy, with the innocence of babes who didn’t know what that control represented.

It wasn’t until many years later, when the colonies and the dictatorship had disappeared, that you realised with hindsight how much they’d taken from you. The owners took away our chance of studying. The dictatorship took from us the possibility of learning our own language.

It wasn’t until the mid-1980s – by which time was over forty – that I had the chance of learning Catalan. I think that is why I’d never thought about being a writer before that. Once I had the tools that let me develop my ideas in my own language – the language in which I thought and felt, the language of my parents and grandparents, the one we used at home all my life – a whole world opened up for me, one I’d never as much as dreamed of.

The next step was to learn the techniques of writing. Here I made my second great discovery.

Why do I write? I’ve asked myself that question many times. There must certainly be more than one answer but only one occurs to me right now: I do it out of necessity.

It is a necessity that awakens your desire to know and to learn. A necessity that leads you along the path of listening to your inner voice. And when you do so, you discover a yearning, a desire to communicate, and to share what you think, what you feel and what you imagine.

I remember how fascinating it was to find out that you can turn an idea into a story. That once the story is outfitted with credible characters, it keeps developing until its denouement.

I’m not saying that this is easy, but knowing the language in which you want to write, on the one hand, and the techniques you have learned, on the other, all well steeped in the necessity I’ve just mentioned, could be the right mixture for succeeding.

There’s nothing so simple and yet so complex. The fact is that everything comes together in one specific point: that of feelings. It all flows from emotion.

However, if there is something that is essential for writing then it must be reading. Reading is a creative act, as writing is. Words read are the starting signal for the elaboration of an idea, which is to say, creation. People say, and I really believe it, that reading is the nourishment of a writer.

From the very beginnings of my literary adventure I had the idea of telling the story of the people who lived in the industrial colonies, and for one very simple reason. I was part of that group. I was just one more among all the people who lived in that place and in a particular era, even though when I decided to write about it I was unaware that nobody had dealt with the subject before, at least in fiction.

However, I did know that the colonies no longer existed as they had originally been conceived and, if those of us who’d had that experience didn’t tell the story, people might never know about them.

While I was learning and preparing to write fiction, my head kept seeking, sniffing out things, imagining. Imagining stories, seeking convincing characters that would help me to construct, through fiction, what I really wanted to describe, namely what went on in the textile colonies. Where people lived tormented by their fears. Where social relations were pervaded by the condescension and despotism of the owners. Owners dressed up in the guise of attentive, protective parents, to squeeze out the highest possible profits.

That is how Olor de Colònia (Scent of the Colony) was born. And that is how I worked, piecing together a character like Teresa. I constructed her out of an impossible love. I made her parents have something to do with that. I had to give her a father who was a bird lover so that, in the depths of despair, she would rebel against him and open all the cages to give the birds the freedom that was denied to her.

That was how I visualised her feeling of being a prisoner, of being locked in a cage. The all-pervasive feeling in that place, the cause of anguish for many of those who lived there.

There is another character that comes under this heading of freedom: Cèlia. She, as I understand it, represents the two worst problems of the colonies. The first was the denial of freedom by the owners who took control of the workers’ lives through education, and the second was caused by the workers themselves, since living in this closed, claustrophobic place bred asphyxiating gossip.

Climent, the great tragic character of the novel, is a victim of the customs of the place and time. He is the oldest son, and cannot leave his parents and, moreover, the woman he loves marries another man.

Victim of a servile education: «yes, sir», is what this character repeats most.

Victim of a plot: he is promoted with the sole intention of turning him into a scapegoat if necessary and, in particular, the victim of his own fears and cowardice.

Another of these key characters is Bernat, the watchman.

There are moments in the novel in which Bernat, the watchman-messenger, almost constitutes the main thrust of the story. He moves around the colony running messages, thus modifying the other characters.

There is also Bernat-dustman: as he cleans up the rubbish of the colony’s inhabitants, he reveals their filth and wretchedness.

He is someone who embodies solitude in his relationship with Moreua, the mule with whom he shares his life and his secrets about his impossible love for Quitèria.

And, still more essential, perhaps, is his friendship with Climent.

And, now, to conclude, I’d like to stress one factor that appears in the novel, the most important one for me because it is the counterpoint to fear, the counterpoint to all the sick, poisoned relationships in the colony. This element is the bridge.

The bridge joins two paths and makes it possible to cross a stream. The bridge, which is understanding and meeting, is also reconciliation.

All this has come out of deep experience, the desire to tell the story and, above all, it has come out of necessity! Which is, perhaps, the reason why I write.