Algarve writer Lídia Jorge stated that respect for women in literature and even realizing that they didn't just write «about pink things» took a long time.
«Until they were respected, until it was realized that women didn't just write about pink things, until it was realized that women had a valid word, it took a long time", she told Lusa, when asked about the fact that It is only now that there is a female name among the Camões chairs – Institute of Cooperation and Language in Brazil.
The chair named after Lídia Jorge at the Brazilian Federal University of Goiás, inaugurated on Tuesday, is the first in the Camões network in Brazil to honor a writer and the ninth in the South American country.
«Evolution, in fact, has been slow. Women everywhere only recently learned to read and write their lives,” she said on the sidelines of the inauguration of the chair.
Still, he stressed, “I'm finally beginning to realize that there are women who write and who have some merit. It’s finally happening.”
Such a change in thinking in society is a stimulus, especially for girls: «seeing female voices, how they got here and the difficulties they had is a stimulus for them to have strength, the capacity for resistance, to believe in themselves», defended Lídia Jorge .
Knowing that women can have “an important role in the most serious plans, in the most important plans” and not only “in just window-dressing activities” but also in political, artistic and scientific terms, has to be normal in society, he said.
The writer hopes, however, that the balance is fair, «because women should not be helped just because they are women».
«I refuse that. They must be recognized on their own merit. There is no happiness just because you are a woman being helped. No, it’s because you have merit,” she stressed.
As for the honor she received on Tuesday in Goiânia, the Portuguese writer expressed gratitude for having decided that her name «deserves to remain as a reference» in a place where «Portuguese studies are valued, but also cultural and Iberian studies and Latin Americans».
Poet, short story writer and novelist, Lídia Jorge began her career with the novel “O Dia dos Prodígios”, in 1980. Over the years, she has been awarded several prizes, including the FIL Grand Prize for Literature in Romance Languages (2020) and the Foreign Médicis Prize (2023).
More recently, in 2022, he wrote “Misericordia”, at the request of his mother, who was admitted to an institution for the elderly, in the Algarve, who asked him several times to write a book with this title.
The story takes place between April 2019 and April 2020, the date of the death of the author's mother, who was one of the first victims of covid-19 in the south of the country.
Lídia Jorge's books have been translated into several languages, such as German, Galician, Bulgarian, Spanish, Slovenian, Greek, French, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Dutch, Romanian, Swedish and English, among others.
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