He smiles, leaning on the bar with a steaming American coffee, letting himself be carried away by the few conversations he catches among the morning regulars of the Bar. "I'm a bit of a gossip and I like to listen to people," admits someone who, easily, an innate conversationalist, would know how to integrate into any of those chats. "And if they lead to books, even better."
An avid reader from a very young age, Toni Rodríguez Piris was an atypical child, more absorbed by reading books than by other stimuli typical of his generation such as TV, cinema, or comics. Delving into written stories, black on white, page after page, scrutinizing the world of some of his heroes like Juan Rulfo or César Aira, has made him and makes him immensely happy. And the consequence of all this reading fervor has been the gradual forging, taking all the time necessary, of his writer self.
"I started writing short stories at sixteen, and in college, I started a novel that remained unfinished. The truth is I have a lot of texts like that, that I started, but I didn't see them going anywhere and, therefore, they remained half-finished," he explains.
For a long time, he put fiction aside. He studied communication and journalism and, at twenty-seven, founded a communication agency. "That leap of faith didn't go badly, the project lasted eight years," but during that time Toni realized that he did nothing but work. "My life was the agency and I told myself that couldn't be, that I had to do other things." He started studying. First, English. "At first it gave me a terrible laziness, but I grew to like it and now I'm always studying something." When he closed the agency, fed up with the life of an entrepreneur, he was happy. "I recovered the reading voracity of yesteryear," he recalls. And, now, there was no stopping the writer he had inside.
The game of searching for the dead
The origin of his recently published debut novel, Approximately two and a half kilos(Univers), is on a trip that Toni Rodríguez Piris made in 2017 with an ex-partner to Montpellier. "There I discovered that Johnny Hallyday had died, whom I didn't know, but I immediately knew he was the great star ofrock and rollFrench." Years later, in 2021, he began a story about it. A couple who travels to France and becomes obsessed with the figure of therockerrecently deceased. Only, unlike so many past stories, this one was going to have continuity."I have always been obsessed with death and the passage of time, as well as relationships and couple's secrets, so it was obvious that my first book had to have these ingredients, combined with my love for travel, as all the places described in its pages I have visited at some point or another in my life," he explains.
The novel thus revolves around a dimensional encounter at an airport, where couples from different generations travel and become obsessed with illustrious dead people. Hallyday, of course, and also Umberto Eco; the visionary former president of Nintendo, Hiroshi Yamauchi; urban planner Joan Antoni Solans or the Indian influencer Anjali Ryot, killed in a shooting in Mexico. "Writing this book has ended up becoming, for me, a game of searching for dead people based on each protagonist couple."
It has been a slow process that has lasted about four years, "with many rewrites and a lot of structural movement." It has been worth it, as the volume has won the Roc Boronat 2025 award. And now, while combining his work as communication director of the Pere Clavé Grup, dedicated to the social economy for people with intellectual disabilities, the writer anticipates that he is working on an autofiction narrated in the first person, "where I do not shelter myself in fictional characters and I expose myself much more." He sips some coffee and adds, laughing: "Where will it end? Will I finish it? Who knows."
Aimless through the city
Until he was twenty-eight, the local lived in Cerdanyola, "but always with the desire to come to Barcelona, where I have been for eleven years now and where I feel I am in my place." In love with the Sant Antoni Market, with second-hand bookstores ---"ah, La Canuda," he longs for---, with spaces like the Arc de Triomf or the Ciutadella, "and of course with Barça, I'm a big culé!", he likes to go for walks through the city streets without a specific destination or any other reason than the pleasure of walking the sidewalks of his beloved city. "More than tourists, whom I don't hate, the humid heat really bothers me. I hate sweating and Barcelona's summer is the worst! And even more so, when you see the streets so dirty... It's a shame," he laments.--- What is spick and span is our kitchen, where we can prepare some lunch for you, if you fancy it.
Toni Rodríguez Piris looks around. It's still very early, but he's coming from the gym and is hungry. He would ask for some pastries, but he takes good care of himself and prefers to hold back. After meditating for a few seconds, faced with the prospect of not missing a good breakfast and, above all, of continuing the conversation, he decides.
--- Let it be a tortilla sandwich!
--- Coming right up!