All photos: Lygia Fagundes Telles and Manuel Alegre, at Fagundes Telles’s home in Sao Paulo, September 26, 2007. Photos by Maria Cecilia Brandi.

The Brazilian novelist and short story writer Lygia Fagundes Telles and the Portuguese writer Manuel Alegre met each other at the Book Biennial in Rio de Janeiro, which took place last September. Alegre is renowned in Portugal as a novelist, poet, and public figure with a long engagement in politics, from his early days as a law student opposing the 40-year dictatorship of Antonio de Oliveria Salazar (1933–74) to his imprisonment and exile in Algiers, to his running for president in the 2006 Portuguese elections. Alegre traveled to Brazil to participate in the launching of his book Cão como nós (A Dog Like Us), a lyrical memoir featuring his family’s relationship with Kurica, an epagneul breton, their companion over many years.

Fagundes Telles, one of Brazil’s most beloved authors and a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, won the 2005 Camões Prize, the most important literary prize in the Portuguese language. She launched her book of essays Conspiração de nuvens (Conspiracy of Clouds) at the book fair. Fagundes Telles’s first book, the story collection Praia viva (Living Beach) was published in 1944. Since then, she has published more than 22 books, among them the groundbreaking novel The Girl in the Photograph (1973).

After being on a panel together at the Biennial, where they laughed, were moved, and moved the public, she and Alegre had the opportunity to meet again at her home in São Paulo for an informal and rich conversation that ranged back and forth in time and between cultures, Portugal and Brazil, and other newly discovered affinities.

—MARIA CECÍLIA BRANDI

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Issue 102 Winter 2008