lit a candle 3h agoMy sister called from home to tell me, and I had to sit down with it a moment. Ninety seven years old, and he didn't even start writing his poems until he was past sixty. There's something in that for all of us who think it's too late to begin.
Their story
Antoni Canu was a Sardinian poet who became one of the best known voices of Alghero, the Catalan speaking city on the north west coast of Sardinia. His first language was Logudorese Sardinian, but he made Catalan, in its Alguerese form, the language of his poetry, and he did not…
Antoni Canu was a Sardinian poet who became one of the best known voices of Alghero, the Catalan speaking city on the north west coast of Sardinia. His first language was Logudorese Sardinian, but he made Catalan, in its Alguerese form, the language of his poetry, and he did not begin writing in it until he was past sixty. His death, at the age of 97, was announced on 9 November 2026 by the Delegation of the Government of Catalonia in Italy.
Canu was born on 19 May 1929 in Ozieri, known in Catalan as Ocier, in the Sardinian countryside. His father died when he was two months old, and he grew up in his grandparents' farming household. When he was ten, in 1939, his mother, who had remarried, moved the family to Alghero, a town of about fifteen thousand people where Catalan was then spoken by children, fishermen and tradespeople alike. He learned it in the street so that he could play with the other boys. During the Second World War the family returned to Ozieri to escape the bombing, and he spent seven years working the land, an experience that later became the heart of his poetry. He married Maria Musso, a woman from Alghero.
From 1985 he studied the language more deeply at the Pasqual Scanu school of Alguerese, and from 1990 he wrote his poems in Catalan. He published five collections: Poesies (1995), En l'arc dels dies (2000), Nou cant (2007), Les mies mans (2014) and Ànimes precioses (2019). In 2008 some of his poems were set to music by the composer Manuel Garcia Morante in Les veus de l'Alguer, and in 2009 the Barcelona publisher Fasolcat issued Itinerari poètic, a collected edition with a disc of his poems sung by Alguerese, Catalan and Sardinian performers and read by Canu himself.
His verse was short, clear and apparently simple, built on memory, the passing of time, love, death, the sea and the fields of his childhood. He could make a poem out of a washing machine, as in Vibracions, and he wrote against war in poems about Kosovo, Sarajevo and Chiapas. He worked to find a literary language that kept the features of Alguerese while remaining readable to Catalan speakers everywhere. His poem Vella Alguer has been used in teaching materials of the Catalan education department to explain the linguistic situation of the city.
In 2009 he received the Premi Nacional Joan Coromines from the Coordinadora d'Associacions per la Llengua Catalana. In 2020 the Government of Catalonia awarded him the Creu de Sant Jordi, and on 30 December 2021 the culture minister Natàlia Garriga presented it to him in Alghero, the first time the distinction had been handed over outside Catalonia.
Announcing his death, the Catalan delegation in Italy said that with work of great sensitivity and human depth he had enriched Catalan literature and helped keep the language and culture of Alghero alive.
Biography adapted from Catalan Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0); VilaWeb (9 November 2026); Edicions Saldonar interview.
Photos
1Antoni Canu
by People Forever
That detail about starting at sixty always stayed with me too.