The future Nobel Prize nominee (Santa Cruz de Tenerife 1845 – Barcelona 1924) moved with his Canary-island-born mother and Catalan father to Catalonia when he was eight years old. A poetic talent, he was proclaimed Mestre en Gai Saber in the Floral Games of 1877; his verse was published in two volumes of Poesies (1887 and 1920). It was as a dramatist, however, that he achieved greatest recognition. His 1879 tragedy Gaŀla Placídia, with its use of the decasyllable and dramatic intensity, marked the beginning of a new high-quality period of Catalan theatre, until then dominated by the more popular plays of Frederic Soler. After Judit de Welp (1883) Mar i cel (1888) and Rei i monjo (1890), Guimerà’s drama underwent a drastic change of direction, using prose rather than verse and adopting a less Romantic and more realist outlook. The high points of this second period are En Pólvora (1893), Maria Rosa (1894), La festa del blat (1896), La filla del mar (1900) and, above all, Terra baixa (1897). In the years after 1900 Guimerà explored different forms and modes of expression.

Meanwhile, he had become a figurehead of Catalan cultural activism. Having co-founded Jove Catalunya in 1870, he moved on to become president of the Lliga de Catalunya in 1889. Among his public interventions are his participation in the Memorial de Greuges (a memorandum of Catalan desiderata addressed to King Alfonso XII in 1885), his support for the autonomist governance Principles of Manresa (1892) and the fact that as president of the Barcelona Atheneum he was the first to deliver his acceptance speech in Catalan (1895). He edited the journal La Renaixença and was a member of the Institute of Catalan Studies. His public discourses were collected as Cants a la patria (1906).

Guimerà’s plays also enjoyed considerable success in Spanish. He was proposed several times for the Nobel Prize for literature. Guimerà died in 1924 in Barcelona, where he was given a state funeral.