Teolinda gersao biography

Teolinda Gersão (born 1940) is a Portuguese writer.
Teolinda Gersão is a Portuguese writer.
Teolinda Gersão was born in Coimbra, Portugal, in 1940 and studied German, Romance and English Studies in Coimbra, Tübingen and Berlin.

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Review Excerpts

THE WORD TREE

Found in Translation – The Word Tree, translated by Margaret Jull Costa

This is the only one of Teolinda Gersão´s 12 novels available in English, and it has just been chosen as the best novel translated from Portuguese in the last three years.

You can see why: it´s as acute about childhood as it is about adults, and the writing is as sensuous as it is sad.

Amélia has left Portugal for pre-independence Mozambique, escaping her family and a failed relationship. She answered a newspaper advert from a man who “seeks a decent young woman aged 25 max”. He promised her beaches with pale sand. She got a lonely life as a dressmaker instead. The section of the novel dedicated to her is the most moving in the book, a series of pin-sharp revelations of envy and isolation. She wants to join the elite, and buys perfume she can´t afford. In the sizzling African heat, she dreams of owning fur coats to give the world she left behind a slap in the face. As a portrait of a desperate colonial it´s worthy of V.S.Naipaul.

But Gersão does youthful exuberance

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Portuguese novelist and short-story writer, author of 16 books, translated in 14 countires. Awards and Prizes :Pen Club (twice), Portuguese Wirter´s Association, International Critics Literary Association (Portuguese Department), Vergílio Ferreira Award etc. Short-listed for the European Prize Aristeion in 1995.Novels in English translation: The Word Tree (Dedalus, UK) and City of Ulysses (Dalkey Archive, 2017).

Papers by Teolinda Gersão

The Dedication, short-story translated by Karen Sotelino, Stanford University, and published i... more The Dedication, short-story translated by Karen Sotelino, Stanford University, and published in Beacons, A Journal or Literary Translation

Numa leitura de matriz psicanalítica seguimos a evolução da personagem da infância à idade adulta... more Numa leitura de matriz psicanalítica seguimos a evolução da personagem da infância à

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Teolinda Gersão was born in Coimbra. She studied German, English, and Romance Languages at the Universities of Coimbra, Tuebingen, and Berlin. She was a lecturer in Portuguese at the Technical University of Berlin, a member of the teaching staff of the Lisbon Arts Faculty, and later professor at the New University of Lisbon, where she taught German Literature and Comparative Literature until 1995. Since then, she has devoted herself entirely to writing. She is the author of twelve books. Her first novel, O Silencio [The Silence], published in 1981, was awarded the PEN Club prize for fiction and was named "book of the year," and was later named one of the one hundred best Portuguese books of the twentieth century. She won another PEN prize for fiction in 1989 and has won the Grand Prix of the Portuguese Writers' Association, the Critics Award of the International Critics Literary Association (ICLA), and the Grand Prix for Short Story Camilo Castello Branco, and was shortlisted for the European Prize for the Novel for Aristeion. She lived for two ye