Once, Martí Sales (Barcelona, 1979) filled an oval shaped office table of about two meters in length with several objects which he thought defined him. There was an electric guitar, an iBook laptop and a pile of books of a wide taste: Miquel Bauçà, Calvino, Ovidio, Burroughs, Mercè Rodoreda, Torrente Ballester, Maurice Blanchot, Lezama Lima, Sebald, Cixous, J.V. Foix, Joan Vinyoli, Enric Casasses, Miró (the catalogue of the retrospective exhibition parking the centenary of the artist’s birth), a volume about the Teatre Lliure de Barcelona... not to forget Incerta glòria, the great novel by his great-uncle, the editor Joan Sales. Also the album by Pepe Sales´ (his uncle and poet) group, Bocanegra U.

Martí Sales is a heterodox and an unrepentant explorer: singer in the punk group Els Surfing Sirles, actor, he has even dared to direct a theatre play ¡Wamba va!, in the Mercat de les Flors (Barcelona), with the peers of his generation and friends Josep Pedrals, Gerard Altaió y Eduard Escoffet. The first book he published was Huckleberry Finn (Vila de Lloseta Poetry Award 2005, Editorial Moll, Mallorca), which he has defined as an adventure novel. But the proposal which has set him in the most current literary panorama and that has attracted the attention of critics is his book Dies feliços a la presó (‘Happy days in prison’, Empúries, 2007). A piece of work, said to be beyond classification, experimental, which brings together sixty five texts with no apparent connection: a mixture of poetic prose and aphoristic with essay and fiction, long and short stories, dealing with very diverse themes and beginning with an autobiographical account, from a diary kept by his father.

Martí Sales is son of the writer and editor Francesc Sales and of the illustrator and translator Eulàlia Sariola. So he has clearly got the creation, reading and love of literature from his family. But this is an inheritance and also a burden that Sales has wanted to atone for in his first piece of prose Dies feliços a la presó.

A graduate in the Theory of Literature and Compared Literature, this creator is above all defined as a writer. He explains that he writes because he has no memory and it is a way of rebuilding himself, rewriting himself, which doesn’t mean reinventing himself: ‘I really think when I write. In order to know. I need to write, because it’s how I reflect and how I grow’. But beyond this underlying reason, Sales also has the will to find the balance between the experimenting and the pleasure of reading. The will to be read.