Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian novelist and short story writer. Her innovation in fiction brought her international renown. She was born in the Ukraine in 1920, but in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Civil War, the family fled to Romania and eventually Brazil. She published her first novel, Near to the Wildheart in 1943 when she was just twenty-three, and the next year was awarded the Gra a Aranha Prize for the best first novel. She died in 1977, shortly after the publication of her final novel, The Hour of the Star.
Prolific and peerless ... a Brazilian national treasure ... Clarice sought a knowledge beyond knowledge, a wisdom that left wisdom behind ... through her texts emerges the struggle of life: how to live each day, what the painful process of loving is, why one should pick up a pen and respond to indignity in the first place -- Carlos Valladares * Gagosian Quarterly *