Lídia Jorge

Portuguese Guest

The Portuguese writer Lídia Jorge is one of the most representative writers of the post-Revolution Generation in Portugal. Her books have been published in many foreign countries where her work has been widely recognized. Lídia Jorge’s roots are in Algarve, Boliqueime, where she was born in 1946. After finishing high school there, she took a degree in Romanic Philology at Lisbon University. Soon after her University studies, she began a life s a secondary High School teacher and in that role she spent some of the most crucial years of her life, working in both Angola and Mozambique during the last period of the Colonial War in Africa. Her first novel, O Dia dos Prodígios (The Day of Prodigies) (1980) is now thought to represent the beginning of a new phase in modern Portuguese Literature. With The Murmuring Coast (1988), a book which reflects her Colonial African experience, Jorge’s important role in the Portuguese Letters was confirmed. Her book O Vale da Paixão (The Painter of Birds, or The Migrant Painter of Birds) (1998), awarded the D.Dinis Prize of the Casa de Mateus Foundation, Bordalo Literature Prize by Casa da Imprensa, the Máxima Literature Prize, the Fiction Prize of P.E.N. Club, and in the year 2000, the Jean Monet Prize for European Literature and European writer of the year. Four years later, Lídia Jorge published O Vento Assobiando nas Gruas (The Wind Whistling in the Cranes) (2002), a novel which received the Grand Prize of the Portuguese Writers Association as well as with the Writing Currents Prize. A Noite das Mulheres Cantoras (The Singer Women’s Night) (2011) is her most recent novel published in Portugal. Jorge has also published two novel anthologies, Marido e Outros Contos (Husband and Other Stories) (1997) and O Belo Adormecido (The Sleeping Beauty Boy) (2003), in addition to the independent publication of the novels The Instrumentalina (1992), and O Conto do Nadador (The story of the Swimmer) (1992). The theatre play A Maçon, (The Mason) was performed at National Theatre Dona Maria II in 1997. The novel The Murmuring Coast has also been recently adapted to the cinema by Margarida Cardoso under the same title. Lídia Jorge novels have been published in Brasil and translated into Spanish, French, English, German, Italian, Greek, Hebrew, Swedish and other languages. In 2006, the author was awarded Germany’s first International Albatroz Literature Prize by the Günter Grass Foundation, for her work to date. Photo by Alfredo Cunha