Itamar Vieira Junior knew next to nothing about the publishing business when he put the finishing touches to the novel he had been writing on and off for decades. His job as a civil servant in the agrarian reform sector regularly takes him to deep Brazil, to the underprivileged countryside.
On a whim, in April 2018, he sent the manuscript of Crooked Plow [“Sillon tordu”, non traduit en français] in a literary competition in Portugal, wondering what the jury will think of his painful story of two sisters living in the depths of a rural district in the north of the country, where the legacy of slavery remains palpable. “I wanted to know if anyone would find value in it, but I didn’t have much hope,” he confides.
Recognized voices
To his surprise, Crooked Plow wins the prestigious LeYa award [décerné par la maison d’édition portugaise du même nom], which rewards new Portuguese-speaking voices. This recognition launched his career and made him an important voice among black authors, whose imaginative and burning works have been shaking the Brazilian literary world for some years and have met with commercial and critical success.
Crooked Plow is the best-selling book in Brazil in 2021; [en février 2022] more than 300,000 copies had already been sold. In 2019, this distinction went to the Small anti-racist and feminist manual, by Djamila Ribeiro [traduit en français chez Anacaona]a short book that dissects Brazil’s systemic racism in sober language.
The Lula generation
Itamar Vieira, 43, and Djamila Ribeiro, 42, are part of this generation of black Brazilians who were the first in their families to obtain a university degree thanks to the social programs put in place by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who ruled Brazil from 2003 to 2010.
Both are among the most eminent personalities of a literary explosion that affects contemporary writers as well as deceased authors, who posthumously receive the praise they were unable to enjoy when their founding works were published. “Writers from marginalized communities have been producing important texts for decades, says Fernanda Rodrigues de Miranda, professor of literature in São Paulo, but they were struggling to get visibility.”
Other types of story
The researcher compiled all the published novels written by black women between 1859 and 2006 that she could find for her doctoral dissertation. She was amazed at the literary quality of these works which were gathering dust in the bottom of drawers and had never been read or discussed. And she concluded that the few authors who met a