Writer
Laia Fàbregas (1973) was born in Barcelona and lives in the Netherlands since 1997. She studied Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona. During the last year of her study, she spent six months in Utrecht, at the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten (HKU). After this period, she decided to stay in Utrecht, she enrolled in language courses and she studied two more years at the HKU, at the department of Architerctural Design.
The following years she worked in many different fields. She was a secretary at a big savings bank, a graphic designer voor an industrial pumps company, a financial controller voor an arts festival and an assistant at an art gallery. At the same time, she studied Arts and Culture Management at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam.
Besides working, she kept devoting her free time to art. Her performances and installations were mostly related to text and words. One of her most noteworthy and persistent artworks is a ‘work in progress’ started in 2001 and not yet finished. Laia writes every day of her life a letter to her friend Margot Annuschek, a Dutch artist, and she sends the letter through regular post. Margot sends also every day a letter to Laia. At the moment, each of them has over twentyfive hundred letters. This work was showed in 2005 at an experimental art gallery in Rotterdam. All de envelopes and the content of some two hundred letters were then displayed.
Six years ago, Laia was working at a management consulting company, while she enrolled at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, at the new department of ‘art and writing’. Even though she took that step in order to find a space where her artworks combined with words would develop, during the first schoolyear the writing started growing faster than the art. She recovered some tales about a girl with nine fingers, which she had written in Catalan when she was nineteen. She translated some of the paragraphs to Dutch and kept writing. While de story of the girl with the nine fingers grew further, her fellow students and the teachers of the Rietveld Academy convinced Laia that the story she was writing was very interesting, and that her Dutch gave a special style to her writing.
After the first year at the Rietveld, Laia got in touch with an agent, who was very enthousiastic about her work. She quitted school and in the following years she combined her job at the consulting company with evenings and weekends of writing, until the first twenty pages grew to a novel.
In januari 2008 The girl with the nine fingers was published in the Netherlands by Anthos. The book has been praised by the Dutch media and it has been reprinted twice within the first three months after publishing. The girl with the nine fingers has been translated to Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian, Danish and Norwegian.
In februari 2010 the second novel by Laia Fàbregas was published in the Netherlands. Landen has good reviews and has been reprinted within two months. Translation rights have been sold to Amsterdam (Catalan).
