Letter from Spain #12

Animal rights activists, Hemingway & Pamplona ... plus TBC news and research

Six people were injured early on Friday, in the first ‘running of the bulls’ of Pamplona's San Fermín festival, and a further four or five were injured in the runs yesterday and this morning.

The bull runs, where thousands turn out to watch or join a group of half-tonne bulls charging along the narrow cobbled streets, always begin on 7 July and take place every morning at 8am for eight days. They last under two minutes and are broadcast live on Spain’s national state channel, TVE1. The same bulls are then killed in a bullfight that same evening.

Roughly a million spectators have descended on the city of Pamplona for a tradition that dates back to the early 14th century.

Protesters with PETA and the Spain-based non-profit ‘AnimaNaturalis’ took to the streets on Wednesday, the day before the official start of the event, wearing red robes and bull horns while holding signs with messages denouncing the killing and torturing of bulls during the event.

Activists have long protested the tradition - dozens covered themselves in fake blood before the Pamplona festival in 2016 and last year supporters wore dinosaur costumes to denounce bullfighting as ‘prehistoric’ - but the Spanish government has recognised the tradition as an ‘artistic discipline and cultural product’ since 2011.

Sixteen people have died in the San Fermín bull runs since 1911. The last death occurred in 2009 when a bull gored a 27-year-old Spaniard. The bulls weigh about 600kg - around 120st - can run faster than any man - and have horns that can slice through anything.

Bull-running events are a highlight of summer festivities across Spain, with the best known being the San Fermín festival which was made famous by Ernest Hemingway's 1926 novel Fiesta - The Sun Also Rises.

PETA have said that ‘more than 125 Spanish towns and cities have rejected the torment and butchering of bulls for entertainment, but in Pamplona, this cruel spectacle continues’.

PETA previously offered Pamplona’s mayor €298,000 to cancel the running of the bulls – an offer that still stands, but which has so far been rejected.

I’m not going to get into the wrongs or rights here (if there are any rights) about the bull-running ‘spectacle’ in Pamplona, only to say that the debate is a central theme of The Barcelona Connection - and one that fascinates me.

When I lived in Madrid from 1988 to 1996, I admit that I saw a few bullfights (I’m not proud of it) and I also read a lot of Ernest Hemingway. It’s all there (but a lot more, too) in A Load of Bull - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid. But it was the debate about bullfighting that sparked my idea for The Barcelona Connection - and which first started life as a film script under the title Until The Cows Come Home (more on the rewrites and initially trying to get it made into a film in a future blog). The title came from a line in the script: ‘You’ll have to wait until the cows come home for Spain to ban bullfighting.’ That is a fact that still stands.

It was a paragraph in Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon that set me off on the journey to start writing what has finally become The Barcelona Connection (and with the art detective and art itself later becoming the central on-going theme for a series of books, and which will have nothing to do with bullfighting):

From observation, I would say that people may possibly be divided into two general groups; those who, to use one of the terms of the jargon of psychology, identify themselves with, that is, place themselves in the position of, animals, and those who identify themselves with human beings. I believe, after experience and observation, that those people who identify themselves with animals, that is, the almost professional lovers of dogs, and other beasts, are capable of greater cruelty to human beings that those who do not identify themselves readily with animals.

The Barcelona Connection - Research

For those of you who have been following this blog at least since 4 June, you’ll know I’ve been writing about my research for The Barcelona Connection, starting with Chapter 1 in ‘Letter from Spain#7’ (Benjamin waking up at the service station), Chapter 2 in #8 (the home of the Marqueses de Guíxols, not far from La Bisbal d’Empordà), and Chapters 3-4 in #9 (Marcos Constantinos in Hampstead; Benjamin at the UEA & Stansted), and last week’s Chapter 5 in #11 (Elena in Girona).

Skipping the research behind Chapter 6 (as it is still Benjamin at the service station), Chapter 7 introduces Séverin and Jürgen …

As far as location research, Jürgen is at Sants Railway Station, a place I’ve spent a great deal of time at over the years - so the research was easy. Séverin is nearby, but he doesn’t know it - as he’s pretty much out of his head. What I did research a great deal is the psyche, or mentality and motivation of animal rights extremists … but we’ll get into that in more detail later on.

Séverin became a central character in the book, thanks mainly to my final editor, the wonderfully named Roxanne Rowles, forcing me to delve further and explore his childhood and background. He finally became Roxanne’s favourite character …

The Barcelona Connection - Reviews, News & Events

I’m delighted to say that I’ve been signed up by Justyna Rzewuska at the Hanska Literary & Film Agency.

A graduate in Italian Philology from Warsaw University, Justyna was the director of the Foreign Rights Department at Penguin Random House in Barcelona, representing writers such as Ildefonso Falcones and Julia Navarro among many others. In 2017 she founded the Hanska agency.

Among the approximately 30 writers she represents (me included now), she hit the news in 2021 when one of them, ‘Carmen Mola’, won the prestigious Premio Planeta de Novela for the historical thriller, La Bestia. It turned out that Carmen Mola was a pseudonym for three male writers - Jorge Díaz, Antonio Mercero and Agustín Martínez - provoking ‘an international debate about collective writing and the use of feminine pseudonyms’.

The Hanska Agency will initially be selling foreign rights for The Barcelona Connection, and worldwide (including English language) for the forthcoming The Madrid Connection.

I am doing an event at The Secret Kingdoms bookstore in Madrid on Thursday 28 September. More details on that very soon.

The Dalí Museum in Florida will be planning an event around the book, and as soon as I have a clearer idea of what it will involve, I will post details about it here.

Links to reviews & articles

Here’s the link for a review of The Barcelona Connection that came out in La Revista, a publication of the British-Spanish Society.

Here’s a link to a review of the book published by the Spain in English online newspaper.

Here’s the link to an article I was asked to write for The Art Newspaper about my research on Salvador Dalí.

You can also click here for the latest reviews on Amazon, as well as on Goodreads and at Barnes & Noble.

The book is available on Amazon or you can also click here to choose where else to order your copy from. It can also be ordered from any bookshop simply by giving the ISBN number: 978-1-7393326-1-7.