Clementina Arderiu

Clementina Arderiu (1893–1976) was born in Barcelona where she trained as a silversmith. She won the ‘Jocs Florals’ for her poetry in 1912; here she met and subsequently married the poet Carles Riba. Together they played an important role in the twentieth-century development of Catalan culture.

Arderiu wrote and published several volumes of poetry between 1916 and her death in 1976. The first ‘complete’ poems came out in 1952, but a subsequent work, Es A Dir (1958), won further prestigious awards. Riba’s death in 1959 left her silent as a poet for some years – her last volume, L’esperança encara, appeared in 1969, and the finally complete Obra Poètica in 1973. In 1985 Maria-Mercè Marçal produced her brilliant anthology, Contraclaror, which gave fresh insight into Arderiu’s work.