“What I feel is that I bring to French readers a Portugal they do not know, and this, for me, is wonderful, because I am bringing my culture, my country, to a country that perhaps has a too submissive view of mine,” said Isabela Figueiredo at the meeting with her translator Myriam Benarroch at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Paris.
The author explains that the translation of this book, “which seems to be about solitude,” but that she believes is about “friendship and how friendship can also save us from loneliness,” “means so much,” acknowledging the role of her “great translator” who understands “the world” of her books.
“Never in my life did I imagine I could be a well-known writer in France, read in France, that French readers would await my new book. That is beyond my dreams, because, I mean, I never thought it was possible. Sometimes we think too low, and of course, I feel proud, very proud of this,” she stated.
In her third book translated in France, in August 2025, by the publisher Chandeigne & Lima, following the success of ‘A Gorda’—whose translation was awarded the Laure Bataillon prize in 2024—Isabela Figueiredo revealed she maintained a dialogue with her translator to ensure the final result had “coherence for the French reader,” as the Portuguese reality is different from the French one.
“I recently discovered that the French know very little about Portuguese politics, economy, and culture,” the author said, mentioning her visit to the literary festival Correspondances in Manosque, France, where she was questioned about April 25, 1974.
Born in Mozambique and having moved to Portugal “a year and a half later,” everything she knows “was read or studied,” which is not the case in France, as Portugal “is very unknown to the French.”
“I mean, they have the idea of the Portuguese who work here, but not of what we are today as a European community country,” she added.
The gathering, a mix of both languages at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, brought together around two dozen readers in the late afternoon to discuss the book that “ideologically corresponds” to what the writer advocates about life, notably “about antispeciesism, about anticonsumerism, about the importance of essence above all.”
“My enormous disdain for appearance, for what others think of us, because what matters is what we really know we are and what our conscience tells us; conscience is crucial for us to have an identity,” she said.
The book, featuring the character José Viriato, named after the writer’s father, who shares her ideals and lives according to his daily questions, and his neighbor Beatriz, explores Lisbon before and after April 25, 1974, to follow their lives, but also the relationship between humans and animals and more recent political issues.
The daughter of Portuguese parents, Isabela Figueiredo, was born in Maputo in 1963. In Portugal, she became a Portuguese teacher, journalist, and published her first book, ‘Caderno de Memórias Coloniais,’ in 2009.
