ABSTRACT
Despite Francoist propaganda, Montserrat Roig was well aware of the facts of the War. Sympathizing with the Republican victims, she included them in both her ction and non-ction works. She came from a Catalan family that preserved its regional language and culture within the home during the Franco regime when it was forbidden to speak or write it in public. Roig could read Catalan by age four and felt early in her life that Spanish, the ofcial language, was an imposed, foreign language (Nichols 147). A graduate of the University of Barcelona, Roig taught at universities in Spain, Great Britain, and the United States, but she was primarily a journalist and a novelist. She began writing for the Catalan magazine Serra d’Or and later wrote for many different magazines and newspapers, including Destino, Cuadernos para el Diálogo, Triunfo, and El País. She did investigative reporting and directed as well as presented numerous television interviews, some of which she later published in anthologies. Additionally, she published over thirty books of non-ction, short stories, theater, and novels. Besides being a prolic writer, Roig engaged in leftist politics from her university years onward, becoming a member of the Catalan Communist Party in 1968. She left it two years later, but continued her political activism, having, for example, participated in 1970 in a protest against the death sentence of sixteen Basque nationalists.
