Following the death of writer Paco Candel at the age of 82, the Library of Catalonia acquired his personal archive for 131,250 euros.
The library justifies the value due to the fact that most of the documents are unpublished and that its exploitation rights can be shared on a non-exclusive basis.
In summary, the archive consists of 220 folders of originals of his essays and books, some 6,000 letters and about 30 handwritten notebooks with his diaries between 1975 and 2004.
It also includes lectures and a novel project.
The archive contains a compilation of reviews of his books and interviews he gave.
It includes press clippings from the 1930s on urban, economic and demographic issues of Barcelona and a hundred photographs.
Paco Candel, the Barcelona chronicler
Having arrived in Barcelona as a child, the writer got to know very closely all the problems of the proletarian suburbs in the big city.
As the years went by, Candel made these concerns his own, which were later expressed in literary form. Many of his works were even censored during the dictatorship.
His best known work is the reportage/essay “Los otros catalanes” (Els altres catalans, 1964), in which he reported on the situation of the agglutination of immigrants on the outskirts of Barcelona.
During his lifetime he published works in Catalan and Spanish.
The personal archive was kept intact by his children and the writer’s sister.
Other works:
- There is a youth that awaits, 1956.
- Where the city changes its name, 1957.
- They have killed a man, they have broken a landscape, 1959.
