Teolinda Gersão

Portuguese Guest

Teolinda Gersão is one of Portugal’s most acclaimed contemporary fiction writers and the author of an extensive body of novels and short-story collections. Her work gives voice to women, confronts colonialism, racism, and dictatorship, and affirms the value of art, imagination and inner life in a world that increasingly pushes them to the margins. She has received numerous major literary awards, her books have been translated in twenty countries, and her fiction has inspired theatre, film, and radio adaptations, as well as inclusion in major international anthologies. She studied in Coimbra, Tübingen, and Berlin, was lecturer at the Technical University of Berlin and later became Full Professor of German Literature and Comparative Literature at Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Since the mid-1990s, she has devoted herself exclusively to writing. Her most recent novels are O Regresso de Júlia Mann a Paraty (Julia Mann´s Return to Paraty, 2021) and Autobiografia não escrita de Marta Freud (Martha Freud´s Unwritten Autobiography, 2024). A former writer-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley, she lives and works in Lisbon.