The writer Lídia Jorge said that respect for women in literature and the realization that they didn’t just write “about pink things” took a long time.
“It took a long time before they were respected, until it was realized that women didn’t just write about pink things, until it was realized that women had a valid word,” she told Lusa, when asked about the fact that only now is there a female name among the Camões – Instituto da Cooperação e da Língua chairs in Brazil.
The chair named after Lídia Jorge at the Brazilian Federal University of Goiás, inaugurated on Tuesday, is the first of the Camões network in Brazil to honor a writer and the ninth in the South American country.
“Progress, in fact, has been slow. Women everywhere have only recently learned to read and write their lives,” she said on the sidelines of the inauguration of the chair.
Even so, she stressed, “people are finally starting to realize that there are women who write and who have some merit. It’s finally happening”.
Such a change in society’s thinking is a stimulus, especially for girls: “seeing women’s voices, how they got here and the difficulties they had is a stimulus for them to have strength, the capacity to resist, to believe in themselves,” Lídia Jorge said.
Knowing that women can play “an important role in the most serious areas, in the most important areas” and not just “in showcase activities”, but also in political, artistic and scientific areas, has to be normal in society, she said.
The writer hopes, however, that the balance will be fair, “because women should not be helped just because they are women”
“I refuse that. They have to be recognized on their own merits. There’s no happiness just because you’re a woman being helped. No, it’s because you have merit,” she stressed.
As for the tribute she received on Tuesday in Goiânia, the Portuguese writer was grateful that they had decided that her name “deserves to be a reference” in a place where “Portuguese studies are valued, but also cultural and Iberian and Latin American studies”.
Poet, short story writer and novelist, Lídia Jorge began her career with the novel “O Dia dos Prodígios”, in 1980. Over the years, she has been awarded several prizes, including the FIL Grand Prize for Literature in Romance Languages (2020) and the Médicis Foreign Prize (2023).
More recently, in 2022, he wrote “Misericórdia”, at the request of his mother, who was in an institution for the elderly in the Algarve, and who repeatedly asked him to write a book with this title.
The story takes place between April 2019 and April 2020, the date of the death of the author’s mother, who was one of the first victims of covid-19 in the south of the country.
Lídia Jorge’s books have been translated into several languages, including German, Galician, Bulgarian, Spanish, Slovenian, Greek, French, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Dutch, Romanian, Swedish and English, among others.
