Barcelona

Starting with the famous last words of Hamlet “and the rest is silence”, I would like to introduce the Catalan e-­?lit communities and their experience of Digital Literature. The Hermeneia Research Group has been one of the pioneers in the field in Spain and has been developing many different activities for the last 10 years. Lately it has been promoting a public debate in Literary Societies on Digital Literature (we will comment the last examples: Premis Octubre in Valencia, 2009, Catalan and Castillian Association of Writers, (AELC/ACEC), Barcelona 2010, Spanish Society of Comparative Literature, Alacant 2010, etc.). Of course the celebration in 2009 of the e-­?poetry festival in Barcelona was one of the big events and helped this open debate on the matter. But in this paper there will be a special space for one of this activities that, for
the last 5 years we have been trying to encourage creativity: the establishment of the international Ciutat de Vinaròs awards. These awards accept creations in languages that already have a tradition of electronic or digital literature, such as English, French or Portuguese, but they also serve to stimulate creative work in languages like Spanish, Italian or Catalan. These works are subsequently studied by the research group and at the same time in undergraduate and postgraduate courses, thus promoting an interchange between the areas of creation, teaching and research. Some of the winners of the Vinaros Award have been selected for the Electronic Literature Collection vol. II of the ELO.