Lolita Bosch: The infinite possibilities of literature

"I remember as if it were yesterday when I made my first letter 'a' on the blackboard, in lowercase. I completed part of my primary education in a rural school, which marked my idea of learning forever. And it's something I haven't stopped doing: I'm always studying something. I've just finished my second doctorate, in philosophy, and I'm still going. I'm proud to have allowed myself to be educated by extraordinary people." Lolita Bosch has arrived at the Bar early in the morning. Energetic, smiling, a swarm of ideas working tirelessly in her head, she asks for silence in the background to enjoy the conversation at the bar and a fresh orange juice.

An award-winning writer, translated, adapted into various formats, and widely read, Lolita's work is unclassifiable due to its breadth and diversity, totaling ninety titles ---"there are more, but those are the ones I have published"--- covering children's, young adult, and adult literature, essays, and anthologies. "All my life I have been researching literature and all its potentialities: creation, social intervention and intimate intervention, philosophy, editing, and a long etcetera. I have tried experiments, inventions, unexpected things, bridges between genres and disciplines. I have had a very, very good time," says the regular who these days is presenting her latest title, El jardí de l'àvia (La Campana), "about the extraordinary relationship my grandmother and I had. It was a beautiful friendship and family members participated in the work. It is a book that I love in a special way."

Born in Barcelona in 1970, she has lived in different places, many of which she feels are her home. "Especially Mexico, where I came to live through one of the most turbulent years of its recent history, 1994, with an intense and absolute cultural effervescence." In this sense, the writer assures that what has most marked her life, outside of her intimacy, has been the war in Mexico. "Exile, threats, the search for justice, investigative journalism, the dignity of the victims, the similarities between local and global systems, love...". All vital ingredients that form part of that other piece of her vital education: the one she was not taught in a classroom.

Literature to heal

23 years ago, Lolita and the writer Mario Bellatin created the Dynamic School of Writers in Salman Rushdie's Network Refuge for persecuted writers, in Mexico, with the idea of giving the proverbial twist to literary teaching, focusing it in a much more creative, transformative, and exciting way. When the parishioner returned to Barcelona, she continued researching all the possibilities that could be derived from the binomial between literature and education. The result is the Mandarina Method: a proprietary methodology developed over more than ten years and a corpus that includes novels, essays, and a doctoral thesis directed by Miguel Morey, which underpins the learning journey and the ethical purpose of her school, Campus Lolita.

Said Method delves into self-learning to write literature or intervene literarily in the social environment, against violence, extreme poverty, and social exclusion. "It is my reference in everything I do. I have applied it to all my projects and I have trained a team of twenty people to apply it and with whom we work in many areas: prisons, abuse, battered women, bullying or neurodiversity. I have found in literature and in the Mandarina Method an intimate and healing application that follows literary creation".

Satisfied with the social work she has carried out and which she now promotes from her Campus, the writer has directed "dozens of projects, hundreds of volunteers and I have had thousands, literally thousands, of students on four continents". And she smiles, inevitably satisfied with a peaceful, but resounding, fight against disinterest and the impunity with which poverty and exclusion daily scourge the lives of thousands of people.

---Meanwhile, you keep typing, right?

---Yes, it's a pulsion that doesn't stop! I'm finishing a book now that I consider important and that makes me very happy, because there's nothing as exciting, for me, as a literary challenge.

Part of its urbanism, but not of its people

In love "with the wide world I live in," the writer emphasizes that she feels at home "in so many places where I am well received and welcomed. The people I have met are fascinating, and I have had the opportunity to encounter the best of the planet. I have no doubt!" Curiously, with Barcelona, the city where she was born, it's not quite the same. "My relationship with it is strange. I feel part of its urbanism, but not of the life that happens within it."

---You don't quite find yourself completely, here?

The parishioner remains silent for a moment to give the answer the best form, before speaking again: "I am very connected to the city from a nostalgic point of view of childhood, but it doesn't make me feel at home. I feel at home in Mexico, in my village in Empordà, in the United States, and in India. A curious aspect is that, lately, I've realized that when I have some time, I love to get on a 'golondrina' (tourist boat), something I had never done until this year, and move away from the city to see it from a distance. That does comfort me."

---What might also comfort you is to accompany that juice you're drinking with something to eat. We have very delicious and one hundred percent artisanal pastries.

Lolita Bosch laughs.

---I'm more into savory food, so I might look at some portion for lunch--- she replies.

---Well, a very good choice!