Tree taught himself Catalan before moving here in 1984, and he has been a staunch catalanista ever since. He has spent the past 20 years writing about Catalans and their culture in their own language. His finest hour came when he won the prestigious Premi Andromina Award for his short story collection Ella ve quan vol (She Turns Up When She Wants To). The material from one book in particular CAT: Un anglès viatja per Catalunya per veure si existeix (CAT: An Englishman Travels Around Catalunya to See if it Exists) has been adapted into a television series titled Passatgers, an ‘infotainment’ programme that he scripts and presents, which was first screened on TV3 (Catalan Public Television) in 2006.
This subjective chronicle of a journey around Catalunya is the result of looking beyond geography to recover forgotten and ignored histories of the people and places he visits. Different episodes have seen him turn his hand to working on building sites with African immigrants, training with the Mossos d’Esquadra, attempting to navigate the city wheelchair-bound with a disabled person and singing bizarre Catalan folk songs with a semi-retired rock musician in a remote part of the Pyrenees.
Matthew Tree is a curious phenomenon. It is one thing to write a novel in one’s own language but quite a different achievement to do it in another. Still, he said, it was natural enough to turn his hand to it in 1990. “It seemed a completely natural process for me; after living in the country for six years, as a writer I could now start communicating with the people I lived among and not just the people I left behind.
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