José Luís Peixoto attends festival in Indonesia and heads to Japan
Writer José Luís Peixoto participates today at the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival, on the island of Bali, Indonesia, the first leg of a trip by the author of ‘Em Teu Ventre’, by Oceania and Asia.
Today, the Portuguese writer participates in the panel Small Towns, Big Imagination, in the literary festival that takes place on the Indonesian island, alongside the British Rosemarie Milsom, New Zealander Joshua Pomare, Australian Jessie Cole and Indonesian Darmawati Majid.
The next day, at this festival, Peixoto, born in 1974 in Galveias, Alto Alentejo, participates in the panel “The Big Read: Journeys”, again with Jessie Cole, also with the Canadian Daisuke Takeya, the Indonesian Agustinus Wibowo, the Indian Carlo Pizzati and the British Jay Griffiths, Geoff Dyer and Will Buckingham.
On Saturday, the author of “Cemetery of Pianos” leaves the festival, participating in a literary lunch on the island next to Nusantara, where he shares the table with the Australian-Indonesian author Tiffany Tsao, the Spanish Gabriela Ybarra, the Uzodinma American Iweala and the Australians Gillian Triggs and Kim Scott.
On the 30th and 31st, José Luís Peixoto will be in Jakarta, where he participates, respectively, in a children’s event, the Kelompok Pencinta Bacaan Anak, organized by the Society for the Advancement of Children’s Literature, and gives a lecture at the local university.
As part of this tour, the writer will be in Tokyo to present the Japanese translation of his novel ‘Galveias’, and participate in a conversation with the Japanese writer Kyoko Nakajima, under the theme “Memories of the Earth, Family Memory”, in the bookstore Shinjiku Kinokuniya.
In the Japanese capital, the author of the novel ‘Uma Casa na Escuridão’ (A house in the dark) will speak at the Sophia and Foreign Studies universities.
The translation of “Galveias” into Japanese reached the bookstores of the archipelago of the Rising Sun Empire in August, with the editorial seal Sinchosha, which published it in its collection “Crest Books”.
“In a few days, the book ranked seventh in the top-selling bookshop of the Aoyama Book Center, one of the most reputable in Tokyo, and the first place in the category of ‘Foreign Books translated into Japanese’,” according to the author’s Portuguese publisher, who plans to attend the Writers’ Festival in Singapore.
José Luís Peixoto won the José Saramago Literary Prize in 2001 for his novel “No Olhar”. In 2007, the work “Cemetery of Pianos” was distinguished with the Cálamo Otra Mirada Prize, destined to the best foreign romance published in Spain.
With ‘Libro’, the author won the Libro d’Europa Prize, awarded in Italy to the best European novel of 2012.
In 2016, with ‘Galveias’, he received, in Brazil, the Oceans Prize for the Best Literary Work in Portuguese Language, published in 2015.
The writer was a finalist of the international awards Femina and Impac Dublin, among other distinctions.
In addition to the fiction, Peixoto published works of poetry, namely “Drawer of Papers” with which he received the Daniel Faria Prize, and “The Child in Ruins” that earned him the Portuguese Society of Authors Award.
In 2012, he debuted in the travel literature with ‘Inside the Secret – A Trip in North Korea’.
According to the Portuguese publisher Quetzal, the novels of José Luís Peixoto are translated into 26 languages.
