Skip to main content
Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing (CCWW)

Lygia Fagundes Telles

Lygia Fagunda Telles_Governa do Estado de Sao Paulo, 2017 (wikcommons CC BY-SA 2.0).jpg
Lygia Fagundes Telles (Governa do Estado de São Paulo, 2017) via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 2.0

Lygia Fagundes Telles was born in São Paulo on 19 April 1918. During her childhood and youth she lived in various cities in São Paulo state and in Rio de Janeiro. In 1941, Telles entered the University of São Paulo’s law school as one of only six women in a class of more than 100 students. There she became friends with Hilda Hilst, who would also become an acclaimed Brazilian author. 

Dubbed ‘the great dame of Brazilian literature’, Lygia Fagundes Telles is one of the most important and prolific Brazilian writers of all time. Her literary production includes novels, short stories, stage and television adaptations, and even a film script: Capitu (1968), an adaptation of Machado de Assis’s Dom Casmurro (1899) written in partnership with her then husband and renowned Brazilian cinema critic, Paulo Emílio Sales Gomes. 

Her literary style is known for its intimate tone, with an emphasis on characters’ inner lives, focusing on human relationships against various socio-political backgrounds. She is known for the use of first-person stream of consciousness as a main feature of her narratives. In that sense her style bears similarities with that of Clarice Lispector, who was a close personal friend: both authors were pioneers (in Brazil) in depicting female characters as protagonists, not to mention approaching old age.

Telles published numerous collections of short stories, as well as four novels: Ciranda de Pedra (1954), Verão no Aquário (1963), As Meninas (1973) and As Horas Nuas (1989). As Meninas won the Jabuti Prize, the most prestigious literary award in Brazil, in 1974, and has been translated into eight languages. The novel recounts the story of three very different young women living together in a boarding house during Brazil’s military dictatorship (which ran from 1964 to 1985). The book’s narrative style is innovative as it moves between first- and third-person points of view. 

Her works are often hard to define according to specific genres, because they blur generic boundaries. Critics have read her writing as a blend of fantasy, horror and magical realism as well as foregrounding female characters, portraying contemporary society and experimenting with language. Towards the end of her career, she published texts which combine memoir, history and fiction, such as Invenção e Memória (2000).

In 1975, she began collecting documents and manuscripts with the aim of creating a Museum of Brazilian Literature, a project which was never realised. The documents were donated to the Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros, and recently re-discovered, digitalised, and made available on the internet (https://museudaliteratura.com.br ).

Lygia Fagundes Telles was widely recognised and celebrated during her lifetime. She won numerous literary awards, including the Jabuti Prize on four occasions (1966, 1974, 1996 and 2001) and the Camões Prize, the most important literary accolade in the Lusophone world, in 2005. She was the third woman to be elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters, in 1985, after Rachel de Queiroz in 1977 and Dinah Silveira de Queiroz in 1980. Her complete works (revised by the author) came out with São Paulo publisher Companhia das Letras in 2009, including essays by literary critics and cover art by Beatriz Milhazes. The same publisher collected all her short stories together in the volume Os Contos in 2018.

Over her long career, several of her short stories and novels have been adapted to other media. As Meninas was developed into a play (in 1988 and 1998) and a film (1995), Ciranda de Pedra became a TV Globo telenovela in 1981 and 2008.

In 1992, the Brazilian Union of Writers (UBE) nominated her for the Nobel Prize of Literature, calling her 'the greatest Brazilian writer alive'. Lygia Fagundes Telles would hold this accolade for another decade, until she passed away on 3 April 2022, aged 98.

Compiled by Roberta Gregoli (Oxford)