Clarice Lispector

(1920 - 1977)

Chaya Lispector was born to Jewish parents in 1920 in Ukraine; her family immigrated to Brazil shortly after. She published her first of nine novels, Near to the Wild Heart, in 1943 to great acclaim. From 1959 to 1961, Lispector wrote a beauty column under the pseudonym Helen Palmer. Of meeting her in the 1960s, translator Gregory Rabassa later described her as “that rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf.” Lispector died of cancer in 1977.