Clarice Lispector

Clarice Lispector (Portuguese: [klaˈɾisi lisˈpɛktoʁ]; née Chaya Pinkhasivna Lispector; December 10, 1920 – December 9, 1977) was a Ukrainian-born Brazilian novelist and short story writer. Her distinctive and innovative works, which explore diverse narrative forms and themes of intimacy and introspection, have earned her international acclaim. She is known for works such as Near to the Wild Heart (1943) and The Hour of the Star (1977).

Clarice arrived in Brazil before she turned two years old, with her family, amidst the pogroms that followed the collapse of the Russian Empire. Born to a Jewish family in Podolia in Western Ukraine, she grew up in Recife, the capital of the northeastern state of Pernambuco, where her mother died when Clarice was nine. The family moved to Rio de Janeiro when she was in her teens. While in law school in Rio, she began publishing her first journalistic work and short stories, catapulting to fame at the age of 23 with the publication of her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart (Perto do Coração Selvagem), written as an interior monologue in a style and language that was considered revolutionary in Brazil.

In 1944, Lispector spent the next decade and a half in Europe and the United States due to her marriage to a Brazilian diplomat. After returning to Rio de Janeiro in 1959, she published the stories of Family Ties (Laços de Família) and the novel The Passion According to G.H. (A Paixão Segundo G.H.). Injured in an accident in 1966, she spent the last decade of her life in frequent pain, steadily writing and publishing novels and stories, including the celebrated Água Viva, until her premature death in 1977.

Lispector has been the subject of numerous books, and references to her and her work are common in Brazilian literature and music. Several of her works have been turned into films. In 2009, the American writer Benjamin Moser published Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector. Since that publication, her works have been the object of an extensive project of retranslation, published by New Directions Publishing and Penguin Modern Classics, the first Brazilian to enter that prestigious series. Moser, who is also the editor of her anthology The Complete Stories (2015), describes Lispector as the most important Jewish writer in the world since Franz Kafka.