Provocative novelist loved ‘impossible narratives’

“She was aware of the sort of trailblazing things that she was doing.”

Isabel Vincent, author, on her longtime friend Nélida Piñon

Nélida Piñon, a trailblazing Brazilian author whose provocative writing won some of the world’s most prestigious prizes, and who became the first woman to preside over the country’s literary academy, died Dec. 17 in Lisbon, Portugal. She was 85.

Her secretary and longtime friend Karla Vasconcelos da Silva said the cause was complications of emergency surgery after battling stomach cancer.

Piñon is widely regarded as one of Brazil’s greatest contemporary writers, admired for her masterly use of Portuguese and her playful approach to literary form.

“Literature opened the doors of paradise and, at the same time, of hell to me,” Piñon told a Portuguese radio station in 2021, referring to the highs and lows of the writing process.

Her whimsical use of religious symbolism and her exploration of sexuality and eroticism were considered daring in deeply Catholic Brazil, which was ruled by a repressive military dictatorship until 1985. And her experimentation with the baroque and the surreal set her apart from most other Brazilian writers of her time.

Piñon wrote more than two dozen books, including novels “The House of Passion” (1972) and her best-known work, “The Republic of Dreams” (1984), inspired by her family’s migration to Brazil from Galicia, an autonomous region of Spain.

From 1996 to 1997, Piñon was the president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, a cultural institution that acts as the country’s main authority on the Portuguese language. She was the first

woman to hold that position.

“She was a pioneer in so many ways,” said Isabel Vincent, an author and investigative journalist whose friendship with Piñon spanned four decades. “And she was aware of the sort of trailblazing things that she was doing.”

Piñon’s work has won awards at home and abroad, including the prestigious Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature, considered Spain’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize. She is also a two-time winner of Brazil’s top literary award, the Jabuti Prize.

Her writing was first brought to English-speaking readers in the 1970s by Gregory Rabassa, a distinguished translator of Spanish and Portuguese literature who also worked with the likes of Gabriel García Márquez.

Although the reach of Piñon’s work never equaled that of better-known Latin American contemporaries such as García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa or Isabel Allende, her writing found an enthusiastic public and was translated into some 30 languages.

Nélida Cuiñas Piñon was born May 3, 1937, in the Vila Isabel neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro. Her father, a merchant, was a Galician immigrant; her mother, a homemaker, was born in Brazil to Galician parents.

As a child, Piñon was a voracious reader, enchanted by the fantasy world of storytelling. She began to write early on, selling her handwritten stories to her father and other family members for a few dollars apiece.

“I wanted to be a writer,” she told Brazilian newspaper Estadão in 2021. “I just knew I loved the stories. Above all, the impossible narratives and, who knows, even the illogical ones. Because the absence of logic gave the story more power.”

In 1961, she published her first book, “Guia-mapa de Gabriel Arcanjo,” a novel mimicking an extended dialogue between an archangel and a woman who wants to live outside the Christian faith. But it wasn’t until “The Republic of Dreams” more than two decades later that Piñon’s status in the Brazilian literary world was cemented.

She taught at the University of Miami from 1990 to 2003, and she was a visiting lecturer at Harvard, Columbia and Georgetown.

Piñon never married or had children.

“She used to say, ‘Literature owes me nothing. I owe everything to literature,’ ” da Silva said.

Piñon wrote one final book before her death, which is expected to be published in spring 2023.

“She was saying goodbye with this book,” da Silva said. “It was her farewell to the world.”

Lavandeira/Associated Press 1998 Acclaimed Brazilian writer Nélida Piñon (left) is embraced by University of Santiago de Compostela rector Dario Villanueva after receiving an honorary degree from the school in 1998.