Isabela Figueiredo

Portuguese Guest

Isabela Figueiredo was born in Lourenço Marques, Mozambique, now Maputo, in 1963, the daughter of Portuguese from the Center-West region of Portugal. After independence from Mozambique, in 1975, she came to Portugal. She graduated in Modern Languages and Literature, variant of Portuguese Studies, at the NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities (Universidade Nova de Lisboa) and specialized in Studies on Women, at Universidade Aberta. She worked as a journalist in the Diário de Notícias newspaper from 1988 to 1994, where she was also coordinator of the DN Jovem supplement. She was a high school Portuguese teacher. Isabela Figueiredo wrote the short story É Como Quem Diz, a work that received the first prize of the Mostra Portuguesa de Artes e Ideias in 1988, and Caderno de Memórias Coloniais, published in 2009 and later revised and reissued in 2015. Her novel A Gorda (2016) was considered one of the top ten books of 2016 by the online magazine Espalha-Factos and won the Urbano Tavares Rodrigues Literary Prize 2017. She writes regularly for her blog Novo Mundo as well as for the press.