Teresa Rita Lopes passed away on Saturday in the Almada municipality, Setúbal district, at the age of 87, confirmed today by a source from Grupo Editorial Presença to the Lusa news agency.
In a message posted on the official website of the Presidency of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa expressed sorrow over her death, highlighting her journey as “an academic, researcher, award-winning writer in various genres, and one of the most distinguished and active Pessoa scholars.”
“Exiled in Paris in 1963, she was a professor at the Sorbonne and earned her doctorate with the thesis ‘Fernando Pessoa e o Drama Simbolista’, at a time when the poet did not have the international recognition he enjoys today,” the note reads.
The note also mentions that upon her return to Portugal, Teresa Rita Lopes “thoroughly studied the writer’s estate (the famous ‘trunk’), thousands of decisive, relevant, or trivial but significant documents, examining the handwriting, versions, heteronyms, and organizing new editions of Pessoa’s work based on her discoveries.”
“Besides other university and literary works, we owe to Teresa Rita Lopes, like few others, the understanding of our greatest contemporary poet,” it adds.
Born in Faro on September 12, 1937, Teresa Rita Lopes was one of the most dedicated researchers of Pessoa studies and also a poet, storyteller, and playwright.
The Algarve author left the country in 1963, fleeing from the PIDE, the political police of the dictatorship, and went into exile in France. She returned to focus on studying thousands of documents from Fernando Pessoa’s estate.
Teresa Rita Lopes took on the task of creating new editions of Pessoa’s work, publishing multiple works from the universe of the poet who died in 1935.
She became known for, during the Estado Novo period, helping to prevent the writer’s estate from being shipped to England for sale, as she recounted in an interview with Postal do Algarve in 2020, emphasizing, “There is still much of Pessoa left to be discovered.”
Among Teresa Rita Lopes’ works are titles such as ‘Cicatriz’ (1996, Eça de Queirós Award), ‘Os Dedos os Dias as Palavras’ (1987), and ‘Estórias do Sul’ (2005).
She was a full professor of Comparative Literature at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa and co-director of the Portuguese language poetry magazine Orion.
