Ana Filomena Leite Amaral | |
---|---|
Born | |
Nationality | Portuguese |
Occupation(s) | Novelist, translator, educator |
Years active | 35 |
Known for | Novels |
Ana Filomena Leite Amaral or Ana Filomena Amaral (born 4 September 1961) is a Portuguese novelist, historian, and translator.
Amaral was born in Avintes, in the municipality of Vila Nova de Gaia in the north of Portugal. Between 1980 and 1984 she studied archaeology and history at the University of Porto. She then went on to study German and German history at the University of Hannover in Germany and then at the University of Coimbra in Portugal, where she also studied English. She also took a course in Documentary Sciences and Library Science at Coimbra University. As an archaeologist she took part in several excavations in Germany and France. [1] [2] [3]
Amaral was the founder in 1997 of the international arts festival Góis Arte, held annually in Góis, a municipality in the Coimbra District. From 2001, in Coimbra, she organised a three-part conference on the role of women in Portugal, covering: (1) The role of women in the academic struggles of Coimbra in the 1960s; (2) Women in politics. Past, present and future; and (3) What was, what is and will be – the role of women in Portuguese politics? She obtained a master's degree in Contemporary Economic and Social History from the Faculty of Letters at the University of Coimbra in 2008, with a thesis entitled Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo - The youthful years at the Universitária Católica Feminina, 1952-1956, which was subsequently published, being the first detailed research to be published on the former prime minister of Portugal. In her home town of Lousã, she founded and directs the cultural cooperative, Arte-Via, and, through that, founded and curates the Festival Literário Internacional do Interior (FLII)—Palavras de Fogo (International Literary Festival of the Interior—Words of Fire). She currently works for the Ministry of Education. [2] [4] [5]
Over a writing career of around 35 years, Amaral has published books ranging from fiction to historical research. In addition to her historical research on Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo, she has published books on her birthplace of Avintes and on the town of Góis. Her fiction includes: [1] [3]
Her trilogy, Mãe Nossa, (Our Mother) is dedicated to the earth and to environmental problems. She describes it as the only environmental fiction in the world. The first book in the trilogy has the sea as its main setting and emphasises the role of corruption in environmental problems. The second is about the Arctic Ocean. [8]
As well as English, her books have been translated into Bengali, Russian, Egyptian, Finnish and Bulgarian. In addition to her own publications Amaral also translates the work of others into Portuguese, mainly from German. [9] [10]
Damião de Góis, born in Alenquer, Portugal, was an important Portuguese humanist philosopher. He was a friend and student of Erasmus. He was appointed secretary to the Portuguese factory in Antwerp in 1523 by King John III of Portugal. He compiled one of the first accounts on Ethiopian Christianity.
José Maria de Eça de Queiroz or Queirós is generally considered to have been the greatest Portuguese writer in the realist style. Zola considered him to be far greater than Flaubert. In the London Observer, Jonathan Keates ranked him alongside Dickens, Balzac and Tolstoy.
Maria de Lourdes Ruivo da Silva de Matos Pintasilgo was a Portuguese chemical engineer and politician. She was the first and to date only woman to serve as Prime Minister of Portugal, and the second woman to serve as prime minister in Western Europe, after Margaret Thatcher.
Presidential elections were held in Portugal on 26 January 1986, with a second round on 16 February.
Henrique Teixeira de Sousa was a doctor and author from Cape Verde.
Avintes is a Portuguese civil parish in the municipality of Vila Nova de Gaia. The population in 2021 was 10,838, in an area of 8.82 km2. It is known in Portugal as "Terra da Broa", meaning "Land of the Broa", referring to the Broa de Avintes, a typical farmhouse bread widely consumed in Northern Portugal, which originated in Avintes.
José João da Conceição Gonçalves Mattoso was a Portuguese medievalist and university professor.
Yara da Silva Amaral was a Brazilian actress.
Ana Luísa Amaral was a Portuguese poet. Professor at the University of Porto, she held a Ph.D. on the poetry of Emily Dickinson and had academic publications in the areas of English and American poetry, comparative poetics, and feminist studies. She was a senior researcher and co-director of the Institute for Comparative Literature Margarida Losa. Co-author of the Dictionary of Feminist Criticism and responsible for the annotated edition of New Portuguese Letters and the coordinator of the international project New Portuguese Letters 40 Years Later, financed by FCT, that involves 10 countries and over 60 researchers. Editor of several academic books, such as Novas Cartas Portuguesas entre Portugal e o Mundo, or New Portuguese Letters to the World.
Women in Portugal received full legal equality with Portuguese men as mandated by Portugal's constitution of 1976, which in turn resulted from the Revolution of 1974. Women were allowed to vote for the first time in Portugal in 1931 under Salazar's Estado Novo, but not on equal terms with men. The right for women to vote was later broadened twice under the Estado Novo. The first time was in 1946 and the second time in 1968 under Marcelo Caetano, law 2137 proclaimed the equality of men and women for electoral purposes. By the early part of the 1990s, many women of Portugal became professionals, including being medical doctors and lawyers, a leap from many being merely office employees and factory workers.
Maria Amélia Gomes Barros da Lomba do Amaral, known as Amélia Da Lomba or Amélia Dalomba is an Angolan writer and journalist. She also served as Secretary of the Missão Internacionalista Angolana. Da Lomba was awarded a presidential medal from Cape Verde in 2005.
Sara Beirão was a Portuguese writer, journalist, women's rights activist and philanthropist. As an author, she is particularly known for fiction aimed at children and youth and for her work as publisher and editor of the Alma feminina feminist magazine.
Maria Lúcia Vassalo Namorado was a Portuguese writer, poet, journalist, teacher and social reformer, and director of the magazine Os nossos filhos.
Ana Vicente was an Anglo-Portuguese writer with a strong Catholic faith, known for her support for feminist causes.
Maria Lígia Valente da Fonseca Severino was a Portuguese and Angolan feminist journalist and writer. She used the pseudonym Lília da Fonseca in her writing. She was the first woman to join a candidate list in legislative elections for Portugal's Assembly of the Republic, in 1957.
Ana Paula Maia is a Brazilian writer and screenwriter.
Ilse Losa (1913—2006) was a Portuguese writer and translator, of German-Jewish origin.
Regina Tavares da Silva is a Portuguese politician, feminist, historical researcher and an international expert on women's rights. She has chaired several women's organizations, both Portuguese and international. She is arguably best known for her insistence that women's equality should not be treated as a social issue but as a requirement of both democracy and human rights.
Maria Lúcia Amaral is a Portuguese lawyer, university professor, politician and judge. She was vice-president of the Constitutional Court of Portugal and is Portugal's 10th Ombudsman, being the first woman to hold this post.
Portuguese theorist Daniela Côrtes Maduro is a researcher focused on digital and experimental literature. Côrtes Maduro has been a researcher w/Po-ex.net & CELL. She chaired and curated Shapeshifting Texts at the University of Bremen/Universität Bremen) as part of her research into multimodal, experimental storytelling.