Quim Torra, the man who didn’t hold back
After twenty years of work in a private company and a couple of years in Switzerland, Quim Torra decided it was time for a change and returned to Catalonia to begin a new life. A lover of literature, journalism, and books, Torra left behind a life of PowerPoint presentations and high-level executive meetings in the insurance industry to focus on writing and to found a new publishing company, called A Contra Vent, which means against the wind in Catalan. That experience was recorded in the pages of Ganivetades suïsses, a voyage (return trip) to the heart of management and unbridled capitalism (Símbol).
Upon returning to Catalonia, Torra immersed himself in archives, correspondence, notebooks, diaries and pages of old newspapers in order to unearth key figures from the best years of Catalan journalism and make them known to everyone. This is how he became the leading expert in the life and works of Eugeni Xammar, a Catalan journalist who spent sixty years travelling the world. He wrote a biography of Xammar, also published by Símbol. Xammar will always be remembered for his commitment to Catalonia, as condensed into a single sentence: “When it comes to Catalonia, I never hold back.” And later on, in 2009, he won the Carles Rahola award for essayists with his work “Involuntary Voyage to an Impossible Catalonia”, about journalists Lluís Capdevila, Àngel Ferran, and Francesc Madrid, who had to go into exile when the Republic was defeated in 1939.
Quim Torra, born in December 1962 in Blanes, has combined his intense work in archives and libraries with an equally intense dedication to cultural and political activism in civic society. He also works constantly as a writer of articles for a number of magazines and newspapers, and as a publisher of dozens of books, under the A Contra Vent seal. His first position in a pro-sovereignty organization was as President of Sobirania i Justícia (Sovereignty and Justice), when in February of 2011 he took over for Agustí Bassols, who had died fifteen days earlier. Torra left the presidency of this organization in March 2014. It was also 2011 when he filed suit —later dismissed— with the European Court of Human Rights against the Spanish Constitutional Court’s ruling that watered down the Catalan Statute.
