IONA-TERESA RIERA

Economist who thinks in systems.
Poet who feels in words.
Novelist who builds from silence. The same person.

The same eye that reads a balance sheet reads a verse.

I grew up surrounded by half-finished books, conversations no one ever closed, and my father — who taught me to see the world in its deepest vibration.

I didn't choose between writing and thinking. I refused the choice.

I have written poetry since I was young. In 2012 I published El cor negre dels ulls clars — first edition in Catalan, sold out.

Five unpublished collections waiting. Two novels underway — the first began in the margins of a notebook, in class, when boredom was more honest than the lesson.

The market I am aiming for is the Anglophone world. Not for comfort. By conviction.

My practice is built on a single obsession:

The totality constructed fragment by fragment.

Not as metaphor. As method.

Word by word. Pressure applied until the surface holds what cannot be said any other way.

I have founded companies, directed finance and process design, worked in five languages across three continents.

Structure is not the enemy of intuition. It is what gives intuition somewhere to land.

And where the work does not represent. It is.

I write the way I paint.
From the body. No safety net. The first impulse is not controlled — it is released, the way I deposit pigment on canvas and gravity does the rest.

Then comes the pressure: word over word, layer over layer, until the page yields or holds. Like the canvas. As in painting, I am not looking for the perfect result. I am looking for the necessary one. The one that could not be otherwise. The one that leaves your hands dirty.

The one that hurts a little in the making. That is what interests me about literature: that it leaves a mark. That it is not decoration. That it grazes something true in whoever reads it.

Calvino, Eco, Rulfo, Kerouac, Dorothy Parker, Roald Dahl, J.V. Foix, Baltasar Porcel, Carles Hac Mor.

These are not influences. They are conversations that are still open. Voices that appear when I write without being invited. Sometimes in the same paragraph.

Sometimes I ask myself: why now? And they answer: because it is necessary.