Rafael Peñas Cruz

Rafael Peñas Cruz is a Spanish-born, London-based writer, translator and retired lecturer of Hispanic Culture and Society.

He has a degree in English philology from the University of Barcelona and a master's degree in Hispanic Studies from Birkbeck College, University of London, the city where he has lived since 1992.

He taught Hispanic language, literature and social aspects of the Spanish-speaking world in different educational institutions across London.

He spent twelve years at the City of London School For Boys, combining it with teaching evening classes for adults at Wandsworth and Woolwich colleges.

He them moved to higher education, first at the London Institute (now University of the Arts) and then at the Language Centre of the London School of Economics, where he worked from 1999 to 2019.

In 2004 he published his first novel in Spanish, Las dimensiones del teatro, and in 2009 his second novel, Charlie, also in Spanish won the 5th edition of the Terenci Moix Prize for gay literature.

After retiring from teaching, a profession he considers the most noble of human activities, he set up Goat Star Books, an independent publishing project specialising in poetry translations as a bridge between people and cultures.

His website, https://quincejellytin.com/, is a project that combines photographs and text to give a narrative form to people’s experiences, creating an archive of human life. This project served as the foundation for a TV programme in his native Catalonia, “Al cel obert”, broadcast by Barcelona’s local television station.

In 2020, he and the Catalan artist Mayca Martínez Victoria published “Una imagen y mil palabras”, a book that explores the relationship between art and life, words and paintings, and literature and reality.

He is now fully engaged with the Goat Star Books project, a publishing house whose vocation is to use the translation of poetry as a bridge of understanding between cultures, making known different voices from both the present and the past.

In 2025 he published his first book in English, “Mystery Languages”, a collaboration with a group of Sheffield-based artists. The book is a poetic articulation of the dialogue they established around the mysterious language that came to one of the artists after he recovered from a brain strike. They are texts, inspired by Taoism and Zen philosophies.

As small independent publishers, Goat Star Books’ strategy is to make books known through events around the themes of the different poetry collections published, collaborating with bookstores and literature festivals, as well as with cultural and educational institutions that may be interested in organising these events jointly.

The aim to bring poetry closer to society, away from the academic niche to which it is often forced due to its "difficult" and minority nature.

Since 2024, he has been co-curator of the Rainham Poetry Festival in Kent.

Rafael Peñas Cruz was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2026.