Born in Barcelona

Mercè Rodoreda i Gurguí was born on October 10, 1908, in Barcelona's Sant Gervasi de Cassoles district. She grew up in a household steeped in Catalanist sentiment; her grandfather was an admirer of the poet Jacint Verdaguer and organized literary gatherings, while her father cultivated a garden named after Catalan literary figures.

This early immersion in Catalan letters and culture, during a period when Catalan identity was being reasserted amid Spanish political centralism, shaped Rodoreda's lifelong devotion to writing in her native language. She received limited formal schooling, largely self-educating through voracious reading, which would later inform the introspective, lyrical prose style she became famous for.

Her birth in a modest but culturally rich family set the stage for a life that would traverse the Spanish Second Republic, the trauma of civil war and exile, and eventual literary triumph. Rodoreda would go on to become one of the most important Catalan-language novelists of the twentieth century, and her birthplace and upbringing in Barcelona remained a recurring emotional landscape in her fiction, most notably in her celebrated novel La Plaça del Diamant (In Diamond Square).