Borja Bagunyà

2022 Spanish Critic’s Prize, in the Catalan narrative category

Packed with pitiless, corrosive humour, Els angles morts is the confirmation of the enormous talent of one of the most striking and original voices in Catalan fiction.

Sesé and Morella have been married for more than twenty years and understand each other perfectly. Her supervision of an unusual birth while on night duty prompts Sesé, an eminent gynaecologist, to begin to reconsider not only the routine in which she has been trapped for years but also the deeper meaning of medical practice and the motives underlying her own professional work.

At her side, Morella, a cynical lecturer who works at the University of Barcelona, has buried the initial enthusiasm that determined his literary vocation in his youth and now lives stubbornly obsessed with the infighting that goes on among the teaching staff and the political manoeuvring needed to move up in the teaching hierarchy. 

What at first seems like another temporary work crisis, one of the couple's favourite themes when it comes to displaying their rich rhetorical repertoire as they fight the world from the sofa at home, will push the marriage towards an unusual existential crossroads in which something much more important than their future careers is in play: the entire meaning of the years lived and the mark they want to leave with their passing.

“An excellent show of literary strength.” Melcior Comes 

“Borja Bagunya’s first novel exudes bile and genius.” Valèria Gaillard, El Periódico

 “A literary work that tackles the mayor themes of birth, love and death with the disturbing touch of a Michael Haneke.” Vicenç Pagès Jordà, La República 

“Thanks to the similes, the metaphors and the adjectivisation – thanks to literature, Bagunyà works the miracle of drawing the reader into the intensity of human consciousness and linking up the irrational sensations that produce the indescribable reality of things.” Ponç Puigdevall, El País

“A totipotent novel. […] Cathedral-like!" Màrius Serra, La Vanguardia

"The cult hit of this World Book Day." Julià Guillamón, La Vanguardia

“A caustic and brilliant existential cascade” El Temps

“A voracious, yet elegant, critique of the establishment.” Diari de Tarragona

“The dead angles of a brilliant and demanding literature in Catalan…” El Periódico

“Borja Bagunyà shuns comfortable narrative moderation, rejecting the conception of the novel as a simple series of cartoons made with words. […]. Dead Angles is a challenge to read; the reward it offers surpasses the effort.” El País

“The performance is in the how, in how Borja Bagunyà hypnotizes us.” Time Out

"A tribute to Melville. Our 21st-century Moby Dick. A miracle." Jaume C. Pons Alorda

"This is an intelligent novel by an author who is in a league of his own: Bagunyà’s writing is out of this world. And, what’s more, this novel is very fun to read.It stimulates us and keeps us following its intellectual, extreme delirium. Its pacing reminds me of Bernhard. And it has Foster Wallace's postmodern touches.” Time Out

“Consensus and prophecy agree that, for the moment, the novel of the year is Dead Angles by Borja Bagunyà (Periscopi). […] Borja has birthed one heck of a book, a landmark in which freedom of form and fosterwallacism frolic in the service of a furiously-paced story and finely-wrought interior depictions of the characters that are hard to match (the birth scene is one of the best written in contemporary Catalan literature).” El Nacional.cat