About Michael Eaude

I have been lucky in my time. Born in London in 1949, I have lived without having to go to war or be hungry. I was radicalized at the University of Kent at Canterbury in 1968. We heckled Foreign Secretary George Brown on the Vietnam War. I went on the two big Vietnam demonstrations in London that year. Lucky and proud to belong to the generation of 1968.

From 1973 to 1990 I lived in Bristol. I was a member of the International Marxist Group until its collapse in the mid-1980s. I always wanted to write and did so only sporadically, as politics consumed my time. But that I don’t regret, as political activity educated me. And we were right: we fought fascism and racism; we organized support for strikes; we marched for abortion rights; we agitated for the troops to leave Ireland; we opposed Thatcher’s imperialist war in the Malvinas. My two passions have been politics and literature.

In 1990 I went to live in Barcelona. I began to write articles, mainly in the English press and on literature. In the past few years, with Marisa, I spend half the year at 1,300 metres in the mountains of Valencia, gardening, walking, reading and writing. In a time of war and of mass famine, of multiple crises, it’s a privileged life.

Barcelona, Catalonia and the Catalan-speaking lands have given me the themes for most of the books I’ve had published since 2001. The main exception is Triumph at Midnight of the Century, on the Madrid writer Arturo Barea, which started out as a PhD thesis and has since been published in Spanish and English.

My latest books are A People’s History of Catalonia (Pluto, London 2022) and a revised Triunfo en la medianoche del siglo (Renacimiento, Sevilla 2023).