Josep Pedrals

- Spain -

Josep Pedrals was born in Barcelona in1979. Since 1997, he brings his poetry to stages. He has performed throughout Europe, Asia and America, giving thousands of recitals in all kinds of festivals and cycles.He has been awarded invarious contestsof recitation, including the Osaka International Slam (2009).

Not a good student (always against impositions), he left his Public Relations studies to be a good studious on poetry and literature. He works in poetry education for children and adults and gives lectures and courses on poetry, prosody and orality in schools, colleges and universities.

He has developed poetry spaces on radio and television (now on Betevé –Barcelona TV) and has collaborated in art and culture sections of various publications (now on El País). He has published a sonnet every day in the newspaperAra during a couple of years (2010-2012).

He has coordinated, from 2002 to 2015, the HORINAL (Obrador de Recitacions I Noves Actituds Literàries – Workshop of Recitations and New Literary Attitudes) directing little poetry festivals and some poetry cycles around Catalonia.

He has written several theatre plays, including Wamba va(Mercat de les Flors,Barcelona, 2005), En comptes de la lletera(La Planeta, 2011), El furgatori (La Seca, 2012), Safari Pitarra (TNC, 2014), Fang i setge (Teatre Victòria, 2016).

He was the keyboardist of the funky-pop band Explosion Bikini(1999-2004) and currently he leads the ironic popgroup ElsNensEutròfics.

He was awarded with the “Lletra d’or” prize in 2013 (to the best catalan book) and the Time Out Barcelona - Best Artist of the Year 2014 prize.


Josep Pedrals is pure spectacle. His poetry, written and recited mostly in Catalan, is conveyed through this language to create endless phonic games, tonal experiences close to music, beatbox.

He is one of the Spanish poets with the most experience in language and metrics, something that would categorize his work close to poetic classicism if his topics did not have a high humorous and ironic content. His work is composed of poems that play with words like the juggler with the clubs. He is able to create an authentic map of tangents, blotters, ups and downs, only with words. His recitals are tonal with an unprecedented lexical complexity that creates echoes in all directions. Pedrals plays with the rhyme, the cacophony, the hyperbaton, the meter, the overlaps... and all with a naughty, electrifying, fresh rhythm. His recitals are dancers, sharp, pure percussion of words, with themes that go from the purest western to a love story told with classes of cheeses. It has no background. He displays to the reader and spectator a huge range that shows all sort of rhetorical forms and all the existing metric figures. All this mixed with a language rich in accents that its final syllables, almost always palatal, generate an authentic drum machine, like a snap fingerboard.

He is a true expert of the verbal. In his free time, he makes tenths. Possibly he has written more than a thousand sonnets (for the newspaper ARA) and he is a master of the sestinas, the quartettos, the couplets, the romances. He creates couplets as a piece of cake, he brags with the seguidillas and he explores every corner of the language until he masters it perfectly. Once he makes it his own, the game begins.

The high level of musicality that he incorporates to the language makes his poetry unique. Undoubtedly, Josep Pedrals work is a casual, bold and captivating rhapsodic with an almost infinite mastery of language.