Carmen Balcells, literary agent to Latin American writers, dies
Carmen Balcells, the formidable literary agent who shepherded a generation of Latin American writers, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, to international prominence, died Sept. 20 at her home in Barcelona. She was 85.
The cause was a heart attack, said Gloria Gutierrez, an agent at the company Balcells founded in 1956, the Agencia Literaria Carmen Balcells.
Nicknamed “La Mama Grande” after a story by Garcia Marquez, Balcells rewrote the rules of Spanishlanguage publishing, negotiating better advances and multibook deals and abandoning a system in which writers would sign openended contracts with publishers. But she was also a larger-than-life presence, a confidante and friend who nurtured and encouraged her writers.
“She was much more than an agent or representative of the authors who had the privilege of being with her,” Vargas Llosa wrote in a tribute to Balcells in El Pais on Monday. “She took care of us, she spoiled us, she quarreled with us, she yanked our ears, and she filled us with understanding and kindness in everything we did, not only in our writing.”
Last year, Balcells signed a letter of intent with the New York literary agent Andrew Wylie to form the Balcells-Wylie agency and bring her writers under joint management. At her death, the merger talks had not concluded, leaving in play not only the future of her agency but also of one of the largest literary estates in the world, that of Garcia Marquez, who died last year and is estimated to have sold more than 50 million books. In an email, Wylie called her “a great woman.” Balcells’ agency also represents some 300 other writers, including Isabel Allende, Javier Cercas and the estates of Carlos Fuentes, Clarice Lispector and Pablo Neruda.
Balcells was born on Aug. 9, 1930, into a family of landowners in Santa Fe de Segarra, a small village in Catalonia. She studied business but never graduated from a university. In a lengthy, multilingual interview in 2014 in her spacious Barcelona apartment, where both her charm and her fierceness were on full display, she said she had studied in Italy for a year, supporting herself by selling fake pearls.
She remembered growing up under the dictator Francisco Franco, when a woman could not open a bank account without the signature of her father or husband. “I wanted to be independent, autonomous at a time when a woman without a rigorous education, without a powerful family, couldn’t choose what to do on her own,” she said.
Balcells married Luis Palomares, who died in 2010. She is survived by a son, Lluis Miquel Palomares; a daughter-in-law; two brothers; and three granddaughters.
Balcells said that besides having a family, her only dream was to open a literary agency with an author like “Gabo,” as Garcia Marquez was known. The two met in 1965, and she sold the U.S. rights to his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, published in 1967. It quickly sold 1 million copies.
In the boom years of Latin American literature in the 1960s and ’70s, amid political turmoil, she brought Garcia Marquez, a Colombian, and Vargas Llosa, a Peruvian, to Barcelona and set them up in apartments.
“Without her, the Latin American boom would not have been what it was,” said Xavi Ayen, a journalist for the Barcelona daily La Vanguardia and author of The Boom Years. “She created the first generation of writers who could support themselves as novelists, and she had them come to live in Barcelona, in the same area, and turned them into great friends.”