Ana Luísa Amaral
Ana Luísa Amaral was born in Lisbon, in 1956, and lives in the north of Portugal. Professor at the University of Porto, she holds a Ph.D. on the poetry of Emily Dickinson and has academic publications (in Portugal and abroad) in the areas of English and American Poetry, Comparative Poetics and Feminist Studies. She is a senior researcher and co-director of the Institute for Comparative Literature Margarida Losa. Co-author (with Ana Gabriela Macedo) of the "Dictionary of Feminist Criticism" (Afrontamento, 2005) and responsible for the annotated edition of "New Portuguese Letters" (Dom Quixote, 2010) 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" (with Marinela Freitas, Dom Quixote, 2014), or "New Portuguese Letters to the World" (with Marinela Freitas, Peter Lang, 2015). She is currently preparing a book of poetry, a novel and two books of essays. Several plays were staged around her work, such as "O olhar diagonal das coisas", "A história da Aranha Leopoldina", "Próspero Morreu", or "Como Tu". She is currently being  translated into English by Margaret Jull Costa, with books published in the United Kingdom and the United States. In 2021, a book of essays on her work will come out by Peter Lang (ed. Claire Williams) titled "The Most Perfect Excess: The Works of Ana Luísa Amaral". Literary career. Amaral's first volume of poetry, "Minha Senhora de Quê" ("Mistress of What"), was published in 1990. The collection's title alluded to Maria Teresa Horta's 1971 volume "Minha Senhora de Mim" ("Milady of Me"), thereby explicitly inscribing Amaral's work into the emergent genealogy of Portuguese women’s poetry . Since then, she has published fifteen further original collections of poetry and two volumes of collected poems, in addition to several translations (including poetry by Emily Dickinson, John Updike and Louise Glück) and books for children. Amaral's poetry has been translated into several languages and volumes of her writings have been published in the United States of America, United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, France, Brazil, Italy, Sweden, Holland, Venezuela, Colombia, Hong Kong, Mexico and Slovenia. She is also represented in many Portuguese and international anthologies. Her work has been awarded several distinctions such as the Gold Medal of Câmara Municipal  de Matosinhos and the Gold Medal of Câmara Municipal do Porto, for "services to literature", or the Medaille de la Ville de Paris, and several literary prizes, such as the Correntes d’Escritas Literary Prize, o "Premio di Poesia Giuseppe Acerbi", o Great Prize for Poetry of the Portuguese Writers' Association, the António Gedeão Prize, the "Internazionale Fondazione Roma, Ritratti di Poesia" Prize, o PEN Prize for Fiction, Prize for Essay from the Portuguese Association of Literary Critics, the "Premio Leteo" (Spain), Best Poetry Book of the Year from the "Grémio de Librerias de Madrid", Vergílio Ferreira Prize, Sá de Miranda  Literary Prize or the . Germany Slovenia