Ana Luísa Amaral
/Portugal, 1956
Ana Luísa Amaral was born in Lisbon, in 1956, and lives in Leça da Palmeira. She has written poetry, plays, children’s books, books of essays and a novel. She translated poets like Emily Dickinson, William Shakespeare or Louise Gluck. She has received various prizes and awards in Portugal and abroad, among them the Great Prize of the Portuguese Association of Writers, the Giuseppe Acerbi Prize, the Premio Internazionale Fondazione Roma, the PEN Prize for Fiction, or the Reina Sofia Prize for Ibero-American Poetry. She is published in several countries. She taught for many years at the University of Porto, from which she received her Ph.D. on Emily Dickinson, and where her academic research centered around Comparative Poetics, Feminist Studies and Queer Theory.
The collection What’s in a name, which will be published by Beletrina at the time of the festival, is an intertwining of everyday and cosmic, poetic and political, compassion and irony, wonder and disappointment - it is a word and a life. The poems lead us to think about the connections between poetry and the world in the originality, purity and precision characteristic of the author, who is one of the most prominent contemporary poets.
Poems were translated by Barbara Juršič.
The poet will be presented in a digital form and with the support of the Camões Institute of Portuguese Language and Culture.