Amat wrote some studies on library science,[1] worked as a librarian, and taught library science at the University of Barcelona.[2] Her first non-scholarly published work was a tome of poetry called Pan de boda (1979).[1] Amat went on to write essays,[3] short story collections and novels in Spanish.[1] She was part of the Barcelona literary scene of the 1970s and 1980s, maintaining friendships with such writers as Juan Goytisolo, Carlos Fuentes, Josep María Castellet or Enrique Vila-Matas.[4]
Amat's literary work is often complex in form and focused on the processes of reading and writing, frequently employing metafiction.[2] Her body of work includes the novel Todos somos Kafka, which both reflects on the literary tradition and its own structure;[2] it was called "magnificent" by Carlos Fuentes in El País.[5] In 2002, Amat won the Premio Ciudad de Barcelona [es] for Reina de América[3] – a novel about a Spanish woman writer living through a civil war in Colombia.[6] Her books have been translated to Arabic, English, French, Italian, Hungarian, Portuguese, Romanian, Swedish,[3] Czech[7] and Polish.[8]
Apart from writing in Spanish, Amat has also been published in Catalan. She has written a theatre play called Pat's Room (1997)[1] and a novel Amor i guerra about the assassination of Leon Trotsky by Ramón Mercader, with whom she is distantly related from the mother's side.[9] The novel brought her the Ramon Llull Novel Award 2011.[1][9] Amat started writing notes for the novel in both Catalan and Spanish, but then decided to write the whole book in Catalan, later creating a Spanish version.[9]
Amat has been vocal about rejecting the normalization of the Catalan language carried out by the Generalitat de Catalunya.[1]
