Origins

I was born in El Prat de Llobregat (Barcelona, Spain) in 1983. We didn’t have many books at home, but a poetic anthology of Federico García Lorca —green cover, the book of my life— and another by Antonio Machado convinced me of the magical properties of writing.

*Here I was a baby, but we won’t go that far back in time to tell my story.*

I remember typing my first poems on my parents’ Olivetti Lettera 32, also green. I have it right next to me as I write these lines.

*My Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter. I don’t use it anymore — I’m not *that* pretentious.*

I asked who performed the magic, who did the writing; I was told it was the journalist, so I decided I would become one. Still unaware of the differences between reality and fiction, I realized some time later that not only were there people who wrote in newspapers, but they did so from far-off, fascinating places. I still didn’t know what a correspondent, a special envoy or a news assignment was, but I already sensed that this was what I liked.

Pushed by this romantic —and false— idea, I decided to study journalism, despite the objections of teachers and family. I started university in 2001, just days after the 9/11 attacks, which would go on to shape my career. I completed the first two years at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) while reading war dispatches every week and novels and poems every day. I was already contributing to local outlets: the magazines Onada de cultures —cultural interviews, essays, poems— and Delta —local politics, social issues…—.

In my third year, I enrolled in an exchange program in the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), where I studied nineteenth-century American literature, the U.S. political system, and the wars in the Middle East. People sometimes ask me why my byline is “Agus Morales”: the answer lies in California. At UCSB I wrote for the student newspaper, the Daily Nexus, but the editor was not sure of my name when he read it, “Agustín Morales,” and decided to spell it wrong: “Augustin Morales.” Since everyone always called me Agus, that’s the byline I used in my next story: “Agus Morales.” The editor put the “u” back in (“Augus Morales”), but… anyway! I decided that would be my byline from then on.