Where the Ter River meets the Mediterranean sea. Textures and colours during a new moon sunset in l’Estartit, Spain. March 2024

G A L L O P is the result of Laia Palma’s inviting me to spend a couple of hours at her Equestrian Club, Equus Empordà (Spain). During this limited amount of time, I followed Laia around her club while she told me about the values behind the vision of the club she has been growing during the last few years. And how her unique relationship with the horses and other animals inhabiting the place make Equus Empordà a very unique Equestrian Club.

Ri Tan Gong Yuan 日坛公园, the park of the temple of the Sun, was one of my secret spots in Beijing. A place I used to go to for reflection. This balcony was one of the spots where I managed to make time to find stillness. It turned out, I wasn’t the only one relying on this sacred space to find solace and to understand the dynamics of an ever changing environment.

Forallac's charcoal pile is much more than just the recreation of a tradition. It has become a symbol of a communitarian way of life and of the preservation of a very important set of Mediterranean values. A place where people gather in an environment in which old lifestyles and ways of being are brought back to life.

This is an excerpt from my book Passing Guest, where I explain my personal relationship between storytelling and language. Beyond my writing, speaking several languages is a big part of my life. I grew up bilingual (Spanish and Catalan) and at different stages of my life I learnt French, English and Chinese, as well as some Korean and Bahasa Indonesia. My relationship with all these languages shaped my experiences and my life away from my home country. In my novel The Mansion South of Maple Street, I wanted to give languages an important value to the story and the are part of the main character’s relationship with the environment in different ways.

Since their foundation in 2013, in Nigeria, Comic Republic has been reminding the world that the heroes and villains of our comics should all have a single mission: to find unity within the diversity of our humanity. Comic Republic’s stories stay away from any of the stereotypes that define African villains in international comics. Instead, they bring a new and much needed approach to the conversation of what it means to be evil.

With this blog post, I want to contribute to the quest for social justice with sharing some of the main resources that I have been using to track my grand uncle down. With the hope that this will help more people like my family to increase their chances to find some degree of peace. And to keep alive the memory of their loved ones who fought for freedom during the Spanish Civil War and the WWII.

Con esta entrada en mi blog, quiero contribuir a la justicia social, compartiendo algunos de los principales recursos que he estado usando para rastrear a mi tío abuelo. Con la esperanza de que esto ayude a más personas a incrementar sus posibilidades de encontrar algún grado de paz por lo que sucedió a sus antepasados y para mantener vivo el recuerdo de sus seres queridos que lucharon por la libertad durante la Guerra Civil española y la Segunda Guerra Mundial.

I have been asked many times what led me to self-publishing in the first place.The truth is there is no specific answer. Multiple factors came into play, and I want to share them here because I think some of the reasons I did so are not often discussed when considering the benefits of self-publishing, and other independent writers might benefit from it.

Passing Guest takes the form of a set of fictional short stories led by an imaginary character, a woman, who embodies eight enigmas of love, kindness and hope. She sets herself on a quest that takes her to Hong Kong, South Korea, North Korea and neighbouring mainland China, The Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Uganda, Senegal, and the cities of London and Barcelona.

As she tries to find her answers, she transports herself to different universes, possibilities of being and seeing, and ultimately of finding love. Soon she discovers that who she is (and who we are) can only be answered by the magic of love, which is as beautifully unique as every single one of us who makes up our diverse humanity.