Enric Valor I Vives - Biography

Biography

Enric Valor was born in 1911, the son of an affluent family from Castalla, in the Valencian comarca of l'Alcoià. In 1930, at the age of nineteen, he became a journalist in Alicante writing in the satirical newspaper El Tio Cuc, in Valencian. During the Second Spanish Republic he started to became politically active. His main demand was for autonomous status for the Land of Valencia. He was also at this time working in the city of Valencia in the nationalist newspapers La República de les Lletres, El Camí and El País Valencià. When the Spanish Civil War broke out he supported the Spanish Republic.

After the war, he cut back on his political activities to concentrate on literature. At the beginning of the 1950s he started to compile "rondalles", a type of folk narrative, which were published as Rondalles valencianes (1950–1958). During the 1960s he returned to underground political activities involving Valencian nationalism and, as a result, he became a political prisoner of Francisco Franco's dictatorship from 1966 to 1968. Once out of prison he founded almost the first magazine in Valencian in the postwar period; Gorg ("Whirl", in Valencian). When Franco's dictatorship ended, Enric Valor was able to spread freely his opinions and literary works. He became honoured with many important literary and linguistic awards from all over the Països Catalans. During the 1990s there was a move among some Valencian cultural groups to propose Valor as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but it didn't come to fruit.

Valor then died in 2000.