Nélida Piñon

Nélida Piñon (born May 3, 1937, Vila Isabel, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil—died December 17, 2022, Lisbon, Portugal) was a Brazilian novelist and short-story writer known for her unusual prose style and inventive use of the Portuguese language.

Piñon’s father was an immigrant from Galicia, Spain. At age 10 Piñon and her family moved to Galicia for two years and lived in the small rural village where her father had grown up. There Piñon learned Galician, and that experience in Spain had a powerful influence on her writings later on. Piñon had a love for books and storytelling from a young age and was encouraged by her father, who gave her an open account at a local Rio de Janeiro bookstore. Piñon attended the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro and graduated with a degree in journalism.

Piñon’s began publishing fiction in the 1960s. Her first novel, Guia-mapa de Gabriel Arcanjo (1961; “Guide Map of Archangel Gabriel”), examines themes that are consistent throughout the rest of her works. In an extended dialogue between the female protagonist, Mariella, and the archangel Gabriel, they speak about her longing to live outside the Christian dogma. Most of her work has a foundation in religious sources. Themes of mysticism and religion that are present in her first work surface in her later books, such as Madeira feita cruz (1963; “Wood Made into Cross”) and Fundador (1969; The Founder; winner of Brazil’s Walmap Prize, 1970). In both novels a main character establishes a new religion. In between the latter two works, she published her first collection of short stories: Tempo das frutas (1966; “Season of Fruit”). In 1970 she launched a program in creative writing at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Her next novel, A casa da paixão (1972; “The House of Passion”; winner of the Mário de Andrade Prize from the Brazilian Association of Art Critics, 1973), delves into the sexual awakening of a young woman. Other erotic novels include A força do destino (1977; “The Force of Destiny”) and Vozes do deserto (2004; Voices of the Desert).

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Piñon’s writing is characterized by a great depth of understanding of the Portuguese language. In works such as A república dos sonhos (1984; The Republic of Dreams), she used poetic language and complex lexical combinations, including the suspension of sentences in the middle of a thought. That book, her best-known and considered her most-important work, is a semiautobiographical novel about a Galician family transplanted to Brazil. It was the first of her novels to be published in an English translation, and it won Brazil’s PEN Club award in 1985. Also of note is A doce canção de Caetana (1987; Caetana’s Sweet Song), which won the Brazilian Writers’ Union prize.

In 1989 Piñon joined the Brazilian Academy of Letters. In 1995 she became the first Brazilian and first woman to win Mexico’s Juan Rulfo Prize for Latin American and Caribbean Literature (now the FIL Literary Award in Romance Languages). From 1996 through 1997 she was the Brazilian Academy of Letters’s first woman president. She received the Rosalía de Castro Prize (a lifetime achievement award for Spanish- and Portuguese-language authors) from the PEN Club of Galicia in 2002 and Spain’s Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature in 2005.