Lídia Jorge

Lídia Jorge was born in Boliqueime, southern Portugal, in 1946. She studied French Literature in Lisbon and spent some years teaching in Angola and Mozambique, during the independence struggle. She now lives in Lisbon. Her first two novels placed her in the avant-garde of contemporary Portuguese literature and since then she has received numerous prestigious awards for her work. In 2013, Lídia Jorge was honoured as one of the “10 greatest literary voices” by the renowned French Magazine Littéraire, and in 2014, she was awarded the Premio Luso-Español de Arte y Cultura. She has been awarded the Vergílio Ferreira Award 2015 for her body of work.

The International Book Fair (FIL) of Guadalajara has granted the renowned FIL Prize in Romance Languages 2020 to Lídia Jorge “because of the magnitude of her work, which portrays the way in which human beings face the great events of history”. The jury also highlighted Jorge’s literary career, “marked by originality and independence of judgement”. The prize honors the author’s lifetime achievement and consists of 150,000 U$. In 2021, Lídia Jorge took up a professorship at the University of Geneva which was followed by the Lídia Jorge Chair created by the UMass Amherst University in Massachussets in 2022, and the Lídia Jorge Chair at the Universidade Federal de Goiás (UFG) in Brazil in 2024. Her novel MERCY has received six prestigious awards, among them the Médicis étranger 2023 and the Transfuge Prize for the Best Lusophone Novel 2023. According to the Portuguese Book Institute DGLAB, Lídia Jorge is the fifth most translated Portuguese author, after Fernando Pessoa, Eça de Queiroz, Gonçalo M. Tavares and Luís de Camões. In 2025, Lídia Jorge was appointed Commandeure des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.