Helena Valenti (1940–1990)

Helena Valenti was born into an upper middle class Catalan family in Spain. She studied Romance languages at the University of Barcelona and at Cambridge University. She became a teacher of Catalan at the universities of Cambridge and Durham and translated the works of English authors such as Doris Lessing, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf into the Catalan language. She was active in the feminist movement in the UK. In 1974, she returned to Spain, where she died in 1990. Her original published works included the semi-autobiographical novels L’amor adult (Adult Love, 1977), La solitud d’Anna (The Solitude of Anna, 1981) and D’esquena al mar (With Backs to the Sea, 1991).