Life as Subtext is a creative writing workshop inspired by Jewish, Converso, diasporic literature, and writers who lived a double life. The workshop explores experiences of exile, memory, estrangement and complex belonging.

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We begin with the historical story of the Jews of Al Andalus or Sefarad and the Conversos, but it is not a history course. Instead, it uses that history as a literary lens through which to ask broader human questions.

Each session begins with an encounter with a writer who wrote from a life of double identities, exile, wandering or complex belonging. Each text opens a door: to memory, to the blank page, to the hidden life, to humour as a way of telling forbidden truths, to alternative histories, to the voice of the other, and finally to the unresolved self. From each reading, a writing exercise emerges.

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The workshop is built for people who want to write through literature: to read closely, think freely, and use great texts as a starting point for their own writing. Over the course of the meetings, participants create a personal body of work shaped by the central question of the workshop: how can the hidden, divided, or unspoken parts of our lives become literary material?

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About the Facilitators

Eyal Zadik is a filmmaker and writer living in Barcelona. He graduated from the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School and has directed several internationally award-winning short films. He is a LABA Barcelona alumnus and is currently developing fictional television series and feature films. He is a passionate reader who falls in love with texts, gets angry at them, envies them, and always enters into conversation with the written word. 

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Erica Consoli is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Barcelona, where she teaches Hebrew language, Hebrew literature and Jewish history. She earned her PhD in Linguistic, Literary and Cultural Studies at the same university, with a dissertation on contemporary Mizrahi poetry. She loves literature, cultural activism, and meeting people from different cultures—whether in life or through the pages of a book—believing that every encounter has the potential to transform the way she sees the world. When reality becomes too difficult to bear, she finds refuge in the words of poets and writers.