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Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing (CCWW)

Ana Luísa Amaral

Ana_Luísa_Amaral 2013 (Mattias Blomgren WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0).jpg
Ana Luísa Amaral at the 2013 Gothenburg Book Fair (Photo: Mattias Blomgren via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0)

The poet and academic Ana Luísa Amaral was born in Lisbon in 1956 but lived, for most of her life, in Leça da Palmeira, a seaside suburb to the north of Porto. After the publication of her first collection in 1990, she quickly became one of Portugal’s best-loved poets, writing 17 books of poetry and texts in many other genres, not to mention extensive academic research, newspaper articles and public radio broadcasts. Although she did not start publishing until 1990, she had written poems since childhood. She did not consider poetry to be her main profession (that was academia), but a compulsion, an activity she carried out with passion. 

In her first collection, Minha Senhora de Mim (1990), she began the practice of dialoguing intertextually with other poets, from antiquity to the present, from Portugal and further afield. Other hallmarks of her poetry are its celebration of difference, in all its senses, and its attention to the everyday joys and challenges of life, especially the expression of women’s lives.

After her undergraduate degree, Amaral studied for a Master’s at the University of Coimbra, where she also started reading feminist literature and theory. She went on to complete a doctorate on Emily Dickinson, a poet who would inspire her throughout her career: the title of her collected works, O Olhar Diagonal das Coisas (2022), references ‘Tell all the Truth but tell it Slant’. 

For many years Amaral taught in the Department of Anglo-American Studies at the University of Porto, where she pioneered the teaching of Women’s Studies and Queer Studies in an education system which was still resistant to new ways of thinking about literature and culture. In 1997 she and her former supervisor Maria Irene Ramalho co-authored the ground-breaking essay ‘Sobre a Escrita Feminina’ and eight years later she co-edited, with Ana Gabriela Macedo, the Dicionário da Crítica Feminista (2005), which introduced influential Anglo-American and French feminist texts and concepts to Portuguese readers. 

She was a founder member of the University of Porto’s ‘Institute for Comparative Literature’ (the ILCML, established 1985), named after her friend and colleague Margarida Losa. Ever active and keen to stimulate meetings, research and conferences, Amaral became the ILCML’s Director and Leader of the ‘Intersexualities’ Research Group, one of several that make up the Institute. She headed up projects such the commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the publication of the feminist classic Novas Cartas Portuguesas (1972), overseeing an annotated edition of the original text and a volume of essays on the book’s international impact, New Portuguese Letters to the World, co-edited with Marinela Freitas (2015).

As well as being a committed educator, and poet, Amaral supported the left-wing Bloco de Esquerda party, taking a stand against the financial restrictions and austerity measures imposed on Portugal by the ‘troika’ (the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank) in the wake of the post-2008 Economic Crisis. She was elected to the Municipal Assembly of Porto in 2013 and in the same year wrote a series of critical crónicas (opinion pieces) for the daily newspaper Público. 

Amaral’s poetry, like her politics, reflects her interest in all of humanity, no matter how humble, and her determination to speak for those without a voice: refugees, the elderly, the poor. In her last collection, Mundo (2022), her attention shifted further, towards the more-than-human world. Her queer sensibility led her towards a poetic exploration of the sensibilities and lives of other species, like magpies, or ants.

From 2017, she presented a weekly radio programme for the national broadcaster RTP2, called O Som que os Versos Fazem ao Abrir. In conversation with journalist and broadcaster Luís Caetano, she would introduce the audience to poems and poets she admired, translating many of them into Portuguese for the first time This was just one of the ways she demonstrated her life-long commitment to being a public intellectual, and championing and making accessible the enlivening powers of poetry.

Amaral was an experienced translator, of poetry, notably Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare’s sonnets, but also prose, including Patricia Highsmith and John Updike. As her fame grew and her work was awarded prizes (culminating in Spain’s Prémio Rainha Sofia de Poesia Ibero-Americana in 2021) and translated into other languages, she was regularly invited to attend literary festivals, academic conferences and poetry readings around the world. She built up a particularly fruitful relationship with her translator into English, Margaret Jull Costa; they often presented their work at joint readings, touring publications around Europe and the United States, clearly enjoying the collaborative process. Jull Costa’s translation of ‘Testament’ was printed in The Guardian on International Women’s Day 2017. 

In 2007, Amaral was awarded her first major prize, the Portuguese Correntes d’Escritas prize, shortly followed by the Italian Giuseppe Acerbi prize. In 2008 she won the prestigious Grande Prémio APE (Associação Portuguesa de Escritores). The accolades continued, not just for her poetry: PEN Clube Português de Novelística (2014); Prémio de Ensaio Jacinto do Prado Coelho (2018); and the Prémio Vergílio Ferreira, in 2021. That same year, she was only the third Portuguese poet to win Spain’s Prémio Rainha Sofia de Poesia Ibero-Americana, awarded at the University of Salamanca during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Ana Luísa Amaral was one of the main authors due to be feted at the 2022 Porto Book Fair, a special tribute from the city she called home, but her untimely death shortly beforehand occasioned a different kind of honour. A tree was planted in her memory in the Avenida das Tílias in the Gardens of the Palácio de Cristal. Her passing also prompted many eulogies, obituaries, special editions and issues of journals.

Ana Luísa Amaral was a great friend and supporter of the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing (CCWW) at the ILCS. She participated in the Centre’s first event, ‘Writing Childhood’, in 2009, and was one of the keynote speakers at the Motherhood Conference in 2013. Recordings of her presentations at both events are available via the CCWW website.
 

Original page compiled by Teresa Louro; updated (2023) by Claire Williams (Oxford) and Andrzej Stuart-Thompson