Agustina Bessa-Luís

Agustina Bessa-Luís (born October 15, 1922, Vila Meã, Portugal—died June 3, 2019, Porto) was a novelist and short-story writer whose fiction diverged from the predominantly neorealistic regionalism of mid-20th-century Portuguese literature to incorporate elements of surrealism.

The best-known of Bessa-Luís’s early novels is A Sibila (1954; “The Sibyl”), which won the Eça de Queirós prize and in which the boundary between physical, psychological, and ironic reality is tenuous and the characters gain an almost mythic quality. In Bessa-Luís’s fiction, notions of time and space become vague, and planes of reality flow together, dimming the sense of a logical order of events. Her prose has been called “metaphysical” and “ultra-psychological,” and the influence of Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka may be distinguished in the fictional worlds she created.

Other well-known novels of Bessa-Luís included Os incuráveis (1956; “The Incurables”), A muralha (1957; “The Stone Wall”), O susto (1958; “The Fright”), O manto (1961; “The Mantle”), and O sermão de fogo (1963; “The Sermon of Fire”). She remained a prolific novelist through the turn of the 21st century, and in 2004 she received the Camões Prize, the most prestigious prize for literature in Portuguese. In addition, several of her works were adapted for film by Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira.