Project Description
Médicis étranger 2023 Lídia Jorge
Portugal
Lídia Jorge was born in Boliqueime, southern Portugal, in 1946. She studied French Literature in Lisbon and spent some years teaching in Angola and Mozambique, during the independence struggle. She now lives in Lisbon. Her first two novels placed her in the avant-garde of contemporary Portuguese literature and since then she has received numerous prestigious awards for her work. In 2013, Lídia Jorge was honoured as one of the “10 greatest literary voices” by the renowned French Magazine Littéraire, and in 2014, she was awarded the Premio Luso-Español de Arte y Cultura. She has been awarded the Vergílio Ferreira Award 2015 for her body of work.
The International Book Fair (FIL) of Guadalajara has granted the renowned FIL Prize in Romance Languages 2020 to Lídia Jorge “because of the magnitude of her work, which portrays the way in which human beings face the great events of history”. The jury also highlighted Jorge’s literary career, “marked by originality and independence of judgement”. The prize honors the author’s lifetime achievement and consists of 150,000 U$. In 2021, Lídia Jorge took up a professorship at the University of Geneva which was followed by the Lídia Jorge Chair created by the UMass Amherst University in Massachussets in 2022, and the Lídia Jorge Chair at the Universidade Federal de Goiás (UFG) in Brazil in 2024. Her novel MERCY has received six prestigious awards, among them the Médicis étranger 2023 and the Transfuge Prize for the Best Lusophone Novel 2023. According to the Portuguese Book Institute DGLAB, Lídia Jorge is the fifth most translated Portuguese author, after Fernando Pessoa, Eça de Queiroz, Gonçalo M. Tavares and Luís de Camões.
Have a look at the author’s homepage: > lidiajorge.com
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Mercy
Dona Alberti lives in a nursing home in 2020. She has poor eyesight but assesses the circumstances and people around her with great clarity. She records what is happening, and her daughter transcribes the texts and gives them their literary force by following in the footsteps of this extraordinary character who has kept her memory intact, her imagination fertile, her curiosity for others and her genuine attention to the beauty of the world, while conversing with death as with a legitimate adversary. Relaying memorable moments in the relationship between mother and daughter, Mercy (»Misericórdia«), is a compendium of vital force and faith in life. A story that is at once brutal, ironic and kind, a mixture of tears and laughter that is unforgettable. It shows us an exceptional woman driven by the immortality of hope. A true literary achievement, an admirable testimony to the human condition.
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In Every Sense
In Every Sense (“Em Todos os Sentidos”), a collection of forty-one chronicles that Lídia Jorge read over the course of a year on Rádio Pública, Antena 2, there are chronicles that face the fury of the contemporary world head-on, interpreting its challenges, dangers and simulacra with a sharp critical eye. But the singularity of these pages of intervention comes, above all, from the fact that the author is capable of combining on the same stage of reflection critical thought about reality and subjective discourse of intimate memory, together with a deeply felt gaze. Inside this book there are unforgettable pages about human life.
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Estuary
Lídia Jorge’s novel Estuary (“Estuário”) is located in present-day Lisbon. The main character is Edmundo Galeano, the youngest son of a shipowning family. After a wrong investment decision by the eldest brother, their possessions are reduced to a house at the mouth of the Tagus and two ships at anchor costing money instead of generating it. In vain the father writes letters to the relevant minister, who was once the boyfriend of his daughter. Edmundo returned three months ago from a posting with a refugee organization in Africa. He lost part of his right hand in an accident in Kenya’s Dadaab, the continent’s largest refugee camp. He now tries to learn again to write by copying out lines from the “Ode Marítima” by Fernando Pessoa. He is planning a book about the tremendous suffering he has seen in Africa, but his father’s suicide and the bad luck that hits his family redirect his interest to his own world and the familiar people around him. In the end he can only write about them.
Estuary is a book about the vulnerability of a man, a family, a society and the very equilibrium of the Earth. A novel of great poetic power about the urgent questions of our time.
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Those We Shall Remember
Those We Shall Remember (“Os Memoráveis”) tells the intriguing story of a number of participants in Portugal’s Carnation Revolution of 1974. When the journalist Ana Maria is asked to make a documentary about this historic event for a US TV channel, she returns to her native Lisbon. Looking for more information in her father’s house, who was also a journalist, she finds a photo of some revolutionaries, taken some time after the event. As she discovers, they all have their own stories to tell, and their personal experiences will change Ana Maria’s perception of her country forever. Written with great psychological subtlety and power of language, Os Memoráveis is a fascinating literary contemplation of Portugal’s arduous road to democracy.
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Those We Shall Remember
Those We Shall Remember (“Os Memoráveis”) tells the intriguing story of a number of participants in Portugal’s Carnation Revolution of 1974. When the journalist Ana Maria is asked to make a documentary about this historic event for a US TV channel, she returns to her native Lisbon. Looking for more information in her father’s house, who was also a journalist, she finds a photo of some revolutionaries, taken some time after the event. As she discovers, they all have their own stories to tell, and their personal experiences will change Ana Maria’s perception of her country forever. Written with great psychological subtlety and power of language, Os Memoráveis is a fascinating literary contemplation of Portugal’s arduous road to democracy.
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The Night of the Singing Women
The Night of the Singing Women (“A Noite das Mulheres Cantoras”) is written with great psychological subtlety and power of language. The student Solange, a member of an all-girl band, witnesses the charismatic lead singer Gisela pressurising young Madalena because she is pregnant, and then covering up her death. Many years will pass before Solange can face up to these events again – and to Gisela, the woman she admired so much back then.
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We Shall Fight the Shadows
We Shall Fight the Shadows (“Combateremos a Sombra”) is a courageous and political novel about our times and about Portugal in the era of globalisation. It tells the fascinating story of three months in the life of the psychiatrist Osvaldo Campos. In the night of the 31st December 2000, he runs into Rossiana, an assistant radiologist, who has just seen a drug courier die in her clinic when a package burst inside his intestines. The clinic is clearly working together with the drug smugglers. Because she knows too much, she is to be killed, but can hide in the house where Osvaldo works. A love affair develops between her and the psychiatrist.
The immediacy of these events finally shakes Osvaldo awake, and through his patents’ stories and traumas he uncovers a conspiracy trafficking in drugs and human beings, in which important public figures are implicated. Suddenly, the evil gets too much for him. “Lying is connected with death”, he writes in his notebook. He has to act, so he turns to the press. The novel also passes on a message of hope, despite its bleak view of our present.
In the book, Portugal is subjected to a constant downpour. Bridges collapse and the water takes everything with it, including corpses. This apocalyptic vision reflects that of a depressive country, where lethargy and apathy have spread like the floodwater – where, in the author’s words, “the chemists have sold out of sedatives”. The title Combateremos a sombra puts salt in the wound and is an attempt to stir awareness for the injustices which are all too common in Portugal and around the world. With the narrative force we have come to expect, Lídia Jorge invites us to join her in a gripping reading experience.
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The Wind Whistling in the Cranes
The novel The Wind Whistling in the Cranes (“O Vento Assobiando nas Gruas”) was published in 2002 and has been awarded the prize of the Günter Grass Foundation, ALBATROS, in 2006. Grandmother Regina Leandro has fled from hospital and is later found dead in front of the entrance to the old cannery in Valmares. Milene, the grand-daughter who lived with her, is the only one there to organise her funeral; her other relatives are away on holiday. Milene, a rather simple-minded person, now tries to find the right words to describe their grandmother’s death to the relatives. The Leandro family, Milene’s aunts and uncles, belong to the wealthy upper-class. The old factory – founded in 1908 – is meantime being rented and lived in by a large family from Cabo Verde. Milene, totally exhausted by the events surrounding the death of her grandmother and initially speechless, is cordially welcomed into that family and stays with them over night.
Thus The Wind whistling in the Cranes is set in two worlds: on the one hand, the history of the cannery, Milene’s aunts and their husbands and men friends, her cousins, all intent on insuring that their reputation is not tarnished by the lonely death of the old woman. All kinds of interests have to be defended, political and financial. The factory is to be sold; the site close to the beach is ideally located for a modern building project. On the other hand, there is the family from Cabo Verde, the old Ana Mata, her daughters and grand-children. A shy relationship develops between Ana Mata’s widowed but young grand-son Antonio, a crane-driver and father of two children, and Milene. When the Leandros finally discover this, they are horrified.
The atmosphere in the novel is coloured by Milene’s unprejudiced view of the people and the events. Looked upon by her relatives as the poor childish orphan, in the very restrictedness of her small world and in all her innocence Milene displays great human warmth and courage.
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The Painter of Birds
In her novel The Painter of Birds (“O Vale da Paixão”), the author again takes her readers back to the world of her childhood. The scenery this time is the old house Valmares, in a village in the south of Portugal. The house is still inhabited by the patriarch, his son and his wife and grandchildren. The other children have left home, emigrated, built up a new life for themselves far away. The decades pass the old house by, and increasingly tourism encroaches upon the rural, isolated life – a sign too of the fundamental changes in Portuguese society over the past fifty years. In the meantime, the granddaughter weaves a dense image based on her memories and full of longing for her real father, who went off and left her mother as a young man, returning only once, when she was fifteen years old. With the story of this loving relationship between father and daughter, an image also emerges of the uncertain destiny of a house, a family, and “a society that neither knows what it is, nor what it should do with its rural past”, as the author once put it in an interview. As a result, much of what is presented in the book seems undecided. Dark gaps remain, full of silence and mystery. Lidia Jorge has again written a novel of melancholic beauty.
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The Garden without Limits
The novel The Garden without Limits (“O Jardim sem Limites”) takes place in a big old house somewhere in Lisbon. Julieta Lanuit, her husband and two children own the house and rent the first floor to very different young people. One of them starts narrating the stories of their lives, and like in a puzzle draws a complex picture of their dreams and frustrations, their conformity and revolt, their togetherness and their solitude.
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The Murmuring Coast
Like many of her generation, the experience of the colonial war was decisive for Lídia Jorge: “The history of this war has yet to be written”, she commented. In her next novel, The Murmuring Coast (“A Costa dos Murmúrios”), she writes about it from the point of view of a woman. Twenty years after a period spent in Moçambique as the young wife of a war-struck officer, the narrator looks back on those months and all their ambiguity, in an attempt to gain some clarity on Africa. Estranged as they are from reality, the colonial lords still preserve their aspirations and notions and imagine themselves to be secure, although the uprising of the suppressed people intimates the approaching loss of their centuries old dominance in Africa. With this novel Lídia Jorge has written one of the most powerful books on the colonial war.
RIGHTS
NOVELS
Mercy (“Misericórdia”)
Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2022, 464 p.
10th edition. over 30.000 copies sold in Portugal
Over 20.000 copies sold in France
English sample translation by Margaret Jull Costa available
Médicis étranger 2023
Shortlisted for Fémina Prize 2023
Finalist of the Oceanos Prize 2023
Transfuge Prize for The Best Lusophone Novel 2023
Prémio Literário Urbano Tavares Rodrigues 2023
Prémio Literário Fernando Namora 2023
Prémio Eduardo Lourenço 2023
Prémio do PEN Clube Português de narrativa 2023
Grand Prize for Novels and Novellas 2022, Portuguese Writers Association (APE)
Brazil: Autêntica Contemporânea 2024 · China: Shanghai Century · Colombia: Tragaluz 2024 · Czech Republic: ARGO · Egypt: Al Arabi Publishing · France: Métailié 2023 · Germany: Secession forthcoming spring 2025 · Israel: Hakkibutz · Mexico: Elefanta (worldwide, excl. Colombia and Spain) 2023 · Spain: La Umbría y La Solana 2024 · USA: Archipelago (worldwide)
Estuary (”Estuário“)
Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2018, 214 p.
Shortlisted for the Prix Médicis étranger 2019
France: Métailié 2019 · Israel: Hakibbutz · Mexico: Elefanta · Spain: La Umbría y La Solana 2019
Those We Shall Remember (“Os Memoráveis“)
Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2014, 352 p.
Albania: Ombra GVG 2017 · Brazil: Leya 2022 · China: Haitian Publishing House 2022 · Czech Republic: Protimluv 2024 · France: Métailié 2015 · Germany: Secession · Italy: Urogallo 2018 · Mexico: Elefanta 2018 · Poland: Świat Książki 2016 · Slovakia: Portugalsky 2021· Spain: La Umbría y La Solana 2022
The Night of the Singing Women (“A Noite das Mulheres Cantoras”)
Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2011, 317 p.
Brazil: Leya 2012 (avail.) · France: Métailié 2012 · Israel: Hakibbutz 2017 · Italy: Urogallo 2020 · Romania: Univers 2014
We Shall Fight the Shadows (“Combateremos a Sombra”)
Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2007, 484 p.
Brazil: Leya 2014, (avail.) · France: Métailié 2008 · Israel: Hakibbutz 2012
The Wind Whistling in the Cranes (“O Vento Assobiando nas Gruas”)
Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2002, 538 p.
Feature film directed by Swiss director Jeanne Waltz, world premiere at the Mill Valley Film Festival 2023
Albatros Literature Prize of the Günter Grass Foundation 2006
Prémio Correntes d’Escritas 2004
Grande Prémio de Romance 2003
Brazil: Record 2007 · France: Métailié 2004 · German: Suhrkamp 2005 · Israel: Hakibbutz 2007 · Italy: Urogallo 2023 · Serbia: Arhipelag 2011 · Spain: La Umbría y La Solana 2023 · USA: Liveright (Norton & Company) 2022; Scribd Inc. 2024 (Spanish Audiobook Rights)
The Painter of Birds (“O Vale da Paixão”)
Portuguese PEN Prize 1998
Lisbon: Dom Quixote 1998, 241 p.
Brazil: Record 2003 · Bulgaria: Lettera 2021 · Colombia: Libros del Fuego (rights in Colombia and Venezuela) · Croatia: Hena-Com 2017 · France: Métailié 2000 · Germany: Suhrkamp 2000 · Greece: Polis 2004 · Israel: Hakibbutz 2005 · Italy: Bompiani 2003 · Romania: Editura Art 2008 · Slovenia: Mladinska 2007 · Spain: Seix Barral 2001 · Sweden: Bromberg 2001 · Taiwan: Marco Polo Press 2021 · Thailand: Library House · UK: Harvill 2001 · USA: Harcourt 2001
The Garden without Limits (“O Jardim sem Limites”)
Lisbon: Dom Quixote 1995, 375 p.
France: Métailié 1998 · Germany: Suhrkamp 1997, pb 1999, 2006 · Greece: Polis 2001 · Spain: Alfaguara 1995
A Última Dona
Lisbon: Dom Quixote 1992, 337 p.
France: Métailié 1995 · Romania: Editura Art
The Murmuring Coast (“A Costa dos Murmúrios”)
Lisbon: Dom Quixote 1988, 259 p.
Film directed by Margarida Cardoso, 2004
Brazil: Record 2004, Autêntica Contemporânea · Bulgaria: Five Plus 2011 · China: Horizon Media Company 2022 · Colombia: Ediciones Uniandes 2018 · France: Métailié 1989 · Germany: Suhrkamp 1993, pb 1995 · Greece: Polis 2002 · Italy: Giunti 1992 · Mexico: Elefanta 2020 · The Netherlands: Arena 1991 · Spain: Alfaguara 2001, La Umbría y La Solana 2021 · USA: Univ. of Minnesota Press 1995
News from the City Jungle (“Notícia da Cidade Silvestre”)
1984, Lisbon: Dom Quixote 1994, 354 p.
France: Métailié 1988 · Germany: Suhrkamp 1990, pb 1992 · Spain: Alfaguara 1990
The Pier of the Snacks (“O Cais das Merendas”)
Lisbon: Europa-América 1982; Dom Quixote 1995, 251 p.
The Day of the Miracles (“O Dia dos Prodígios”)
Lisbon: Europa-América 1980; Dom Quixote 1995, 206 p.
France: Métailié 1991 · Germany: Beck & Glückler 1989, Suhrkamp pb 1992 · Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica · Spain: La Umbría y La Solana · The Netherlands: de Prom 1996
STORIES (selection)
Love in Lobito Bay (“O Amor em Lobito Bay”)
Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2016, 192 p.
Spain: La Umbría y La Solana 2017
Praça de Londres
Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2008, 98 p.
Colombia: Libros del Fuego (rights in Colombia and Venezuela) · Denmark: Eva Kvorning 2021 · Italy: Arcolaio 2016 · Slovenia: LUD
O Belo Adormecido
Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2004, 241 p.
Marido e Outros Contos
Lisbon: Dom Quixote 1997, 141 p.
Bulgaria: Five Plus · Denmark: Eva Kvorning 2021 · Germany: die horen 1999 · Slovenia: LUD · Spain: Ed. Xerais 2005 (Galician)
My Dear Bicycle (“A Instrumentalina”)
Lisbon: Dom Quixote 1992, 39 p.
Brazil: Peirópolis 2016 · Colombia: Editorial Caballito de Acero 2019 · Czech Republic: Protimluv z.s. (Magazine) 2022 · France: Métailié 1995 · Germany: Suhrkamp 1998, Diogenes 2013 · Italy: Urogallo 2010 · Uruguay: Banda Oriental 2021 · USA: Grand Street 1999
ANTHOLOGIES
Fortæller (“A Prova de Pássaros” and “Marido”, in: Marido e Outros Contos;
and “Perfume”, in: Praça de Londres)
Denmark: Eva Kvorning 2021, 80 p.
CHRONICLES
In Every Sense (“Em Todos os Sentidos”)
Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2020, 264 p.
Grand Prize for Chronicles and Literary Disperses 2021
CHILDREN’S BOOKS
O Romance do Grande Gatão
Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2010, 48 p.
O Grande Voo do Pardal
Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2007, 28 p.
O Conto do Nadador
Lisbon: Contexto, 1992
Italy: Urogallo 2019
PARTICIPATION IN ANTHOLOGIES
Autoportrait de l’Europe par ses écrivains
(Story by Lídia Jorge: “Diante do Promontório”)
France: Ed. Grasset et Fasquelle 2022, 465 p.
Zwischen den Büchern
Germany: Weissbooks 2018
Best European Fiction 2018
USA: Dalkey Archive Press 2017
Take Six: Six Portuguese Women Writers
UK: Dedalus, 2018
(several stories, taken from: My Dear Bicycle and Other Stories [“A Instrumentalina e Outros Contos”] and Love in Lobito Bay [“O Amor em Lobito Bay”])