(1938 – ) Relying on an active writing that questions and leads to question what moves us, Maria (de Fátima Bívar) Velho da Costa elaborates a textual tessitura where her passion for the world of writing articulates with a writing of the world. The author’s writing covers fiction, chronicles and drama, with some incursions into poetry, of which the works Corpo Verde [Green Body] and Da Rosa Fixa [From the Fixated Rose] are the most relevant examples. It is throughout this diversified textual typology, that the world is being written in a more or less... Read More

(1970- ) Maxim Leo is a German writer, journalist and screenwriter, born in East Berlin in 1970, in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). He is the author of several essays written in German, of which we highlight Haltet euer Herz bereit: eine ostdeutsche Familiengeschichte, [Keep your heart ready: an East German family story] that won the 2011 European Book Prize, an award instituted by the European Parliament aimed at fostering the adherence to the European spirit and project. This work was masterfully translated to French by Olivier Mannoni with the title Histoire d’un Allemand... Read More

(1907-1995) Born in S. Martinho de Anta and in debt to the vital sap of Douro’s slaty lands, Miguel Torga early on took in other Portuguese landscapes where he wandered and ascertained the nature of the Motherland and its people, relishing on the harmony in the difference he exemplified in the granite metaphor: “The granite is mica, quartz and feldspar, – but it is granite. It suffices that each ingredient is pure for the resulting rock to have the beauty, the hardness and the nobility we know” (2000a: 54). Although he was very emotionally attached... Read More

(1916-1996) Vergílio António Ferreira was born in Melo, a village in Gouveia county. Europe appears frequently in his fiction, essays and diaries, especially from the moment in which he becomes the figurehead of existentialism in Portugal. The final pages of Mudança (1949) [Change] witness the new post-Second World War European scenario, which motivates the rupture of the book’s main character with his past as a sympathizer of Nazism, with the consequent drift towards a heterodox thought, markedly existential. As pointed out by Luís Mourão (vd. 2003: 61), in the explicit of Mudança the narrator seems... Read More