Spanish Nobel-nominated writer in the Catalan language. His work is known for bringing together under romantic aspects the main elements of realism. He is considered one of the principal representatives of the so-called Renaixença, at the end of the nineteenth century.
Guimerà wrote a number of popular plays, which were translated into other languages and performed abroad, proving instrumental in the revival of Catalan language as a literary language (Renaixença) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By far, the most famous was his realistic drama Terra baixa (“Lowlands,” also translated as “Martha of the Lowlands”). Written in 1896, it quickly became an international sensation. The play was translated into 15 different languages and the Spanish translation was presented regularly for a period of thirty years by Enric Borràs’s theatre throughout Spain and Latin America. In English, the play received three Broadway productions between 1903 and 1936.
In addition to being a popular stage play, Terra baixa was made into six films, including a silent film in the United States, Martha of the Lowlands (1914) and Leni Riefenstahl’s Tiefland (1954). Furthermore, it served as the source material for two operas: Eugen d’Albert’s German opera Tiefland (1903) and Fernand Le Borne’s La Catalane (in French).
Playwright Àngel Guimerà was nominated twenty-three times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, though he never won, due to controversy about the political significance of the gesture. He was a candidate for the Nobel Prize in 1904, to be shared with the Provençal writer Frédéric Mistral, in recognition of their contributions to literature in non-official languages. Political pressure from Spain central government having made this prize impossible, it was eventually awarded to Mistral and to the Spanish language playwright José de Echegaray.
He died on 18 July 1924 in Barcelona.
According to Xavier Albertí who wrote a 2016 biography of Guimerá, the homosexuality of Guimerá “is proven by all the documents that Guimerá left in his legacy”.
Link to Wikipedia biography