The cycle «Singular People. Conversations with writers» will have as its first guest the writer Lídia Jorge, who will have a conversation with João Ventura, next Friday, June 24, at 18:30 pm, at Casa Manuel Teixeira Gomes, in Portimão.
This is a cycle promoted by the Institute of Ibero-Atlântica Culture (ICIA), which arises «thinking of readers who are curious to know what goes on in an author's mind when he writes a book, how his biography is projected in writing. or what relation the fictional matter has to reality».
Born in Boliqueime, Lídia Jorge, who is one of the most unique voices in Portuguese literature, has already traveled the world, but always returns to the images of a vanished rural Algarve. It is here that he writes, in his family's house, and here he returns, again and again, and this time to talk in Portimão.
The focus of the conversation will be your new book, which may be the key to revealing how your fictional writing relates to your biography.
All the more so that, according to João Ventura, “in Love in Lobito Bay, each of the stories, one can perceive, unravels one or another passage in her life, as if this book could also be read as a diary, as, in fact, Lídia Jorge herself confesses”.
According to the note that accompanies the book, “they are tales of persistence, memory of moments, brief moments of lightning, during which the light illuminates too much, and something is clarified forever, even if the shadow is never exhausted.
Tales that, as João Ventura explains, “are brief self-fictions, ephemeral illuminations, punctuated by everyday life questions, encounters and disagreements, travels. The proposal will therefore be for us to listen to Lídia Jorge's voice, also telling her what she heard and hears in the world around her”.
Lídia Jorge was born in 1946, in the Algarve. She is the author of a vast work that is widely recognized and translated into many languages, which has adaptations to theater and cinema. Highlights the movie The Coast of Whispers (1988), one of the most powerful texts on the colonial war, adapted to cinema in a film by Margarida Cardoso.
For all her work, she won the prestigious award from the Günter Grass Foundation, in Germany, ALBATROS (2006) and the Grand Prize Sociedade Portuguesa de Autores – Millennium BCP.
In 2011, she was awarded the João Neves da Fontoura Latinity Prize; the jury, chaired by Eduardo Lourenço, awarded Lídia Jorge for «the consecration of her work, which has greatly contributed to the enrichment of the cultural and literary heritage of contemporary Portugal».
In 2013, the magazine Le Magazine Littéraire considered her one of the 10 great voices of foreign literature.
She was also distinguished with the 2014 Luso-Spanish Art Culture Award and the 2015 Virgílio Ferreira Award.
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