Who is Carme Riera, the Palma novelist who became vice-president of the Real Academia Española?

Carme Riera Guilera was born in Palma, on the island of Mallorca, on 12 January 1948. A novelist, short-story writer and essayist, she writes in both Catalan and Spanish, alongside a university career spanning several decades.

She studied Hispanic philology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), earning her degree in 1970, followed by a doctorate on the Barcelona School, a group of post-war Spanish poets.

Hired as a teacher at the UAB in 1971, she became a full professor (catedrática) of Spanish literature there in 1995 and has headed the José Agustín Goytisolo Chair since 2002.

Her first book, the short-story collection in Catalan «Te deix, amor, la mar com a penyora», was published in 1975 by Laia, after being written between 1971 and 1974. The title story had already won the Recull prize in 1974. The collection brings together seventeen stories in which women and the sea are recurring protagonists, written in spoken Mallorcan Catalan, according to the Balcells literary agency, which represents the author.

Her literary career has since been marked by a string of awards: the Prudenci Bertrana prize in 1980, the Ramon Llull prize in 1989 for «Joc de miralls», then in 1994 the Josep Pla, Joan Crexells and Lletra d'Or prizes for «Dins el darrer blau», a novel that the following year became the first Catalan-language text to win Spain's Premio Nacional de Narrativa. In 2000 she received the Creu de Sant Jordi from the Generalitat de Catalunya, and in 2015 the Premio Nacional de las Letras Españolas.

Elected a member of the Real Academia Española on 19 April 2012, to seat «n», she formally took her seat on 7 November 2013 with a speech on travel writers who described Mallorca between 1837 and 1936. On 14 December 2023, the RAE's plenary elected her vice-president of the institution, a first for a woman in that role, which she described in a statement: «It's an honour, a responsibility, and also proof that the presence of women academics at the RAE is becoming ever more notable».

In 2024 she published the novel «Una sombra blanca» with Alfaguara, presented on 17 April that year at the RAE's headquarters in Madrid. Asked in June 2024 by journalist Sergio Vila-Sanjuán, in an interview published by the cultural magazine Turia, what her life would have been without literature, she answered: «It wouldn't have been a life».

Photo credit: portrait of Carme Riera, photograph by Elisa Cabot (2012), CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.

This portrait was prepared with AI assistance, then cross-checked, verified and edited by our editorial team, who take full editorial responsibility for it. Facts verified on 18 August 2026.