Welcome to the Intralingo World Lit Podcast, featuring authors and translators from around the globe.
Amora is a brilliant collection of stories that portray female love: romantic, familial, and platonic.
Natalia: "I wanted to have this queer kid that sees a strange figure, a ‘stranger’. She wants to know about her and then she hears this word machorra and she wants to know what it is. When we think about literature that has lesbians as main characters, people go directly to sexuality, they're young women discovering their sexuality. I wanted to run away from this. I wanted to write about other things. That's why I always have this family context."
Julia: "What Natalia was talking about is something that really drew me to the book, which is sort of moving away from the central theme of a queer novel being [about] sexuality. These are all women who are lesbians, but also women who are friends and daughters and partners and kids who play chess, and it creates this very beautiful and very interconnected universe."
Natalia, Julia, and I spoke about differences between the two parts of this collection (divided into Big & Juicy and Sweet & Tart), differences in how the book has been received by readers over time, by different generations, and now in another language.
Having won nearly every major literary prize in Brazil on publication in 2016, it’s a delight to now be able to read this book in English.
Thank you to AmazonCrossing for the review copy, and to Natalia and Julia for the wonderful conversation!
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Bios:
Natalia Borges Polesso is from Bento Goncalves in Brazil. She is a writer and a translator with a PhD in literary theory. She is the author of Cutouts for Photo Album without People (2013), Amora (2015)--which in 2016 won the Jabuti Award, the Jabuti Amazon Reader's Choice Award, the Book of the year AGES Award, and the Acorianos Literature Award--and Control (2019), among other titles. In 2017, she was one of only two Brazilian authors on the Bogota39 list, which selects the most promising Latin American authors under thirty-nine.
https://www.instagram.com/nataliaborgespolesso
Julia Sanches is a translator of Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Catalan. She has translated works by Susana Moreira Marques, Noemi Jaffe, Daniel Galera, and Geovani Martins, among others. Her shorter translations have appeared in various magazines and periodicals, including Words without Borders, Granta, Tin House, and Guernica.
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You can purchase the book from Intralingo's Bookshop.org affiliate store, direct from the publisher or ask your local bookstore or librarian.
Amora - https://bookshop.org/a/4438/9781542004336
Enjoy and thanks for listening!
Lisa Carter
Founder & Creative Director, Intralingo Inc.
BRAZIL – Interview with author Natalia Borges Polesso & translator Julia Sanches