Bessa Luís, Maria Agustina

▪ Portuguese writer

born Oct. 15, 1922, Vila Meã, Port.

      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 (Proust, Marcel) and Franz Kafka (Kafka, Franz) may be distinguished in the fictional worlds she created.

      Other well-known novels of Bessa Luís include 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.

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