Mercè Rodoreda is the author of many great novels of modern Catalan literature. She began as a contributor to La Veu de Catalunya and La Publicitat and published four novels, of which, years later, only Aloma (Joan Crexells Prize, 1937) was saved. At the end of the Civil War, Rodoreda, having collaborated with the Catalan government's Commissariat of propaganda, went into exile in France with the idea that it would be only for a short while: World War II caused her to flee to Geneva and she did not return to Catalonia until 1972. In exile, she wrote the centerpiece of her fiction, The Time of the Doves (1962). Following that, she published Camellia Street (1966), Garden Near the Sea (1967) and My Cristina and Other Stories (1967). Upon settling back in Barcelona she completed her most ambitious novel, A Broken Mirror (1974), which draws an excellent portrait of Catalan society at the turn of the twentieth century, followed by the collection of short stories Travels and Flowers (1980), How Much War (1980), and the unfinished Death and Spring. Rodoreda was awarded the Prize of Honour in Catalan Literature in 1980. She is Catalan literature's most translated author: her work can be read in Twenty-seven languages and has also been adapted for cinema and television.