FULL BIOGRAPHY

Teolinda Gersão is one of Portugal’s most acclaimed contemporary fiction writers, the author of a major body of novels and short-story collections. Gersão has received numerous major literary awards, and her work gives voice to women, confronts colonialism, racism, dictatorship, and affirms the value of art, imagination, and inner life.

Her fiction consistently defends art, imagination and inner life in a world that increasingly pushes them margins.

Her novels include O Silêncio, Paisagem com Mulher e Mar ao Fundo, A Casa da Cabeça de Cavalo, A Cidade de Ulisses(The City of Ulysses), O Regresso de Júlia Mann a Paraty, Autobiografia não escrita de Marta Freud and the Mozambique-set A Árvore das Palavras (The Word Tree), alongside two novellas and four collections of short stories.

Her work has been translated in more than twenty countries, and her short fiction has appeared in leading international anthologies such as New Sudden Fiction: Short-Short Stories from America and Beyond (W. W. Norton, 2007), Antología del Cuento Português (Alfaguara, 2012), Take Six: Six Portuguese Women Writers (Dedalus Europe, 2018), Best European Fiction (Dalkey Archive Press, 2019), Lisbon Stories (Oxford University Press, 2019), Antologia da Literatura Contemporânea Portuguesa (Tokyo, 2019) and Valuri, dune, case deschise (Bucharest, 2025).

Several of her works have been adapted for the stage in Portugal, Germany and Romania, and for short and medium-length films, including the acclaimed adaptation of “Vizinhas”.

She has received Portugal’s most significant literary awards and has been described by critics as one of the most important living Portuguese writers.

Gersão has been writer-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley, and is an honorary member of the Real Gabinete Português de Leitura in Rio de Janeiro. She was awarded the Gold Medal of Cultural Merit by the City of Coimbra (2021). Her most recent book is Autobiografia não escrita de Marta Freud (2024), winner of the Grand Prize for Novel and Novella APE/DGLAB (2024), and the Urbano Tavares Rodrigues Literary Award (2025). She lives in Lisbon.

Born in Coimbra, Teolinda Gersão studied German, Romance and English Studies at the Universities of Coimbra, Tübingen and Berlin. She was a Lecturer in Portuguese at the Technical University of Berlin before joining the University of Lisbon, and later became Full Professor at NOVA University Lisbon, where she taught German Literature and Comparative Literature. Her life and writing have been deeply marked by extended periods abroad, including three years in Germany, two years in São Paulo and travels to Mozambique.

Since the mid-1990s, she has devoted herself exclusively to writing.

Her fiction has appeared in the BBC, New York Public Radio, Symphony Space Theatre, W.W. Norton, The ThreePenny Review, The Common, A Public Space, and Words Without Borders.

Gersão’s books have been reviewed in (selected):

Los Angeles Review of Books, Intelligent Life (The Economist), The Times Literary Supplement, The Irish Times, Luso-Brazilian Studies, Purge Review, Cosmopolitan, L’Humanité, Lire, Le Contemporain, Sitartmagazine, Alors, Público, Expresso, Folha de S.Paulo, Valor (Globo), Jornal de Petrópolis, Jornal Rascunho, Portuguese American Journal, Jornal de Notícias, Diário de Notícias, Jornal de Letras, Jornal de Negócios.