DANI VENTURA

I was born in Barcelona in 1979. I've moved house seven times and lived in three different countries. I believe that, with every new shake, my motivations and my urge to create have multiplied. It was during one of those shakes that the writer emerged.

Sometimes, things come about in the simplest of ways. With a natural, organic movement. My friend Llauna, a little cat who had accompanied me through two moves and two different countries, had passed away. A few months later, my partner's birthday was approaching. We were both still struggling to face this new reality without her. And I came up with a cool present: to tell a story in which Llauna was the protagonist, transformed into a charming little monster, and give my partner one chapter every day for two weeks, until finishing the story on her birthday. And that was how the "writer me" came to be.

That way of creating stories was new to me. I was much more used to writing songs, and prose had never seriously entered my plans. I polished that story until it became a short novel for children, which will see the light of day someday (when the time is right!). In the meantime, as the spark of writing had already caught hold of me, I started writing short stories and even entering competitions. As luck would have it, some of them received a little recognition, and I became a finalist twice in a row in the Frederic Pujulà horror and science fiction short-story competition, which has been championing these genres in Catalan from Figueres. These two stories, "The Dining Room" and "The Purple Truth", are the beginning of my career as a writer.

There will be much more to come.