The Loulé City Council congratulates, in a note sent to the newsrooms, the writer Lídia Jorge for attribution of the Great Prize for Romance and Novel by the Portuguese Association of Writers to his most recent book “Misericórdia”.
The novel, written at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, is now in its fourth edition and will be published in August in France, followed by Germany, Spain and Mexico.
This is the second time that the internationally renowned writer from Loulé has received this award: the first was in 2002, with the book “O Vento Assobiando nas Gruas”.
«“Misericórdia”, by Lídia Jorge, is a hymn to reading, literature and the transforming power of both in human life, but also to the power of literature to lift the underprivileged of time and our common social imaginary from the ground up. A novel of rare discursive maturity, it never ceases to surprise us with its apparent simplicity, which demands from the reader a certain way of attunement or training capable of allowing him to capture it in its discreet complexity”», considered the jury, chaired by José Manuel Vasconcelos and made up of Isabel Cristina Rodrigues, Maria de Lurdes Sampaio, Mário Avelar, Paula Mendes Coelho and Salvato Teles de Menezes.
“Misericórdia” was unanimously chosen among 86 books submitted to the contest.
A wandering through old age and loneliness, this was a novel that Lídia Jorge wrote at the request of her mother, Maria dos Remédios, who would die during the Covid-19 pandemic in Boliqueime. “I wrote this book under the echo of my mother's voice”, said the Algarve writer, in one of the several interviews she gave when the book was launched in October 2022.
Lídia Jorge made her debut in 1980, with the publication of “O Dia dos Prodígios”, one of the most emblematic books of post-revolution Portuguese literature. Since then she has published works in the areas of novel, short story, essay, theater, chronicle and poetry. Her texts have been adapted for theatre, television and cinema and have been distinguished with the main national and international literary awards.
Widely translated and published abroad, among the awards it has received are the ALBATROS Prize from the Günter Grass Foundation, the FIL Prize for Literature in Romance Languages in Guadalajara or the Great Prize for Chronicle and Dispersed Literary Loulé.
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