In the words of the UIC Barcelona writing lecturer, the novel “Nos recordarán (They will remember us) takes the reader back to the summer of 1794, which Goethe and Schiller spent together, a time that proved pivotal not only for their work, but also for their personal relationship”. It is a universal story about the meaning of life.

Based on a real letter in which Johann Wolfgang von Goethe invites Friedrich von Schiller to his home, the author imagines what those days were like, interwoven with real events and other characters. “It is the story of two of the most influential authors in European literature, always haunted by the unerring presence of the women in their lives, often the only points of light in an existence that is clouded to absolute darkness”.

The work involved in writing Nos recordarán formed part of the PhD on writing by Carla Gracia, at the University of Bath Spa: “When I finished it and the Encyclopaedia Group bought the rights”, she explains, “there was still a process of revision and translation to be done, because I had written the original book in English, titling it They will remember us”.

This whole process has led, in Gracia's words, to the coincidence of another novel, a bio-fiction by Mercè Pàniker: Con ojos de mujer. “I spent a year and a half writing this one and translating and editing the other. I find it hard to write two books at once, because when I'm writing one, I become absorbed and can’t think of much else. But I can combine different stages of the process”.

Carla Gracia is the author of several books. In 2014 her first novel, Siete días de Gràcia, was published and translated into Spanish, Italian and Polish, for which she won several prizes, including the Alghero Donna Prize for Literature and Journalism in the International category of the Rome Book Fair.

[Foto: Rebeca Pardo]