Gemma Ruiz Palà, born in Sabadell, Barcelona, in 1975, is a journalist and writer. She worked as a scriptwriter for Spanish Television, and as a journalist specialising in culture in such media outlets as Catalunya Ràdio, the daily ARA, and the magazine Enderrock. She is presently deputy director of News in TV3, the Catalan Television News Service which, with a staff of more than three hundred, is the largest newsroom working in the Catalan-speaking domain.

As a writer, Gemma Ruiz has chosen Catalan as her language. Her decision is due to her family’s linguistic background and also her conviction concerning the importance of contributing to the dissemination of one of Europe’s most ancient and most persecuted languages. The Franco dictatorship tried to eradicate Catalan by banning it for forty years.

She also chose a focus for her literary work: stories featuring women who, in history as told from the viewpoint of men, did not count. Hence, her debut was with a book in which the working class women from her hometown became the heroines. Acclaimed by the critics, ‘Argelagues’ (Gorse) was a literary phenomenon. Twelve editions were printed, and more than 25,000 copies were sold, when the average number of books sold in Catalan is 1,000. Her second novel ‘Ca la Wenling’ (published in English as ‘Wenling’s’) was launched simultaneously in Catalan and Spanish, just a few days before the COVID-19 lockdown. Even so, this novel about other invisible heroines was one of Catalonia’s books of the year and now, in 2023, the first translations of the book are being published internationally.

This year, Gemma Ruiz received the Sant Jordi (St George) Prize for the Novel, the best endowed and also the most prestigious of Catalan literary awards, for her book ‘Les nostres mares’ (Our Mothers). The prize-giving ceremony was also news for another reason as Gemma Ruiz was the first woman to receive the prize after nineteen years of its being awarded to men.

So far, her novels have been translated into Spanish, French, Italian, and English.
She has contributed to the book Women Writers in Catalan (Raig Verd, 2017) and the jointly authored anthologies El llibre de la Marató (Columna, 2017) and Dies que duraran anys (Ara Llibres, 2017), which has been translated into Spanish and English (Days That Will Last for Years).

As a writer, she has been invited to literary festivals like the Kolkata Literary Meet, Kosmopolis in Barcelona, Gutun Zuria in Bilbao, Feminism Festival in Rome and the Milano Book Pride.