The Art of Biography
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Date
- / Cancelled / Sold out
Location
Auditorium 2 Calouste Gulbenkian FoundationThis event will be presented in Portuguese and English with simultaneous translation and livestreamed on this page.
‘To be a biographer you must tie yourself up in lies, concealments, hypocrisies”, Freud wrote to Arnold Zweig in 1936. As for autobiography, “it is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful”, observed George Orwell.
Are these damning accounts accurate? What is specific about a literary genre based in the Greek work Βιογραφία, which combines life (bios) and account (graphia)? And why did it only gain recognition in Europe in the 19th century, two thousand years after Plutarch wrote Parallel Lives, bringing to life Pericles, Alcibiades and Julius Ceasar?
In an era of fast selling bestsellers, riddled with revelations, are Freud and Orwell’s observations vindicated or are biographies an art to be reckoned with?
With some of the world’s most renowned authors of the genre, these are just some of the questions to be debated.
Speakers
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António Tomás
António Tomás earned his PhD from Columbia University in New York City. He worked as a journalist in Angola and Portugal and is the author of a biography on the African nationalist Amílcar Cabral and a study on the process of urbanization of Luanda, the capital city of Angola. He taught in Uganda and South Africa and is currently an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California Irvine.
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Clare Mac Cumhaill
Dr. Clare Mac Cumhaill and Dr. Rachael Wiseman are philosophy lecturers, friends and co-authors of Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy back to Life. Mac Cumhaill is an expert in the philosophy of perception and aesthetics at Durham University, UK, home of the Mary Midgley Papers; Wiseman lectures at Liverpool University, UK, and is a recognised authority on the work of Elizabeth Anscombe. They are the co-founders of www.womeninparenthesis.co.uk, a scholarly project that makes the case for analytic philosophy’s first all-female philosophical school.
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Rachael Wiseman
Dr. Clare Mac Cumhaill and Dr. Rachael Wiseman are philosophy lecturers, friends and co-authors of Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy back to Life. Mac Cumhaill is an expert in the philosophy of perception and aesthetics at Durham University, UK, home of the Mary Midgley Papers; Wiseman lectures at Liverpool University, UK, and is a recognised authority on the work of Elizabeth Anscombe. They are the co-founders of www.womeninparenthesis.co.uk, a scholarly project that makes the case for analytic philosophy’s first all-female philosophical school.
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Heather Clark
Heather Clark is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow and the author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the LA Times Book Prize. Red Comet won the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism, the Slightly Foxed Prize for Best First Biography, and was a New York Times Top Ten Book of 2021. Clark is the author of two award-winning monographs, The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes and The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast, 1962-1972, and a forthcoming novel, The Scrapbook. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Harvard Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a group biography of mid-century women poets in Boston, and a biography of Anne Sexton, to be published by Knopf.
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Maria Antónia Oliveira
Maria Antónia Oliveira is the author of the books Não. Uma Biografia do Ar.Co (2014), Alexandre O’Neill, Uma Biografia Literária (2007), A Tristeza Contentinha de Alexandre O’Neill (1992), and Os Biógrafos de Camilo (her doctoral thesis from 2010). Since 2002, she has been dedicated to the biographical genre in the form of essays and biographical narratives. She is the editor of Alexandre O’Neill’s work for Assírio & Alvim. She also wrote the dramaturgy for the play Portugal, Meu Remorso, based on texts by Alexandre O’Neill (2015). She is a co-author of the screenplay for the film Um Filme em Forma de Assim (2022), directed by João Botelho. She teaches the Biographical Writing course at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences (FSCH) of Nova University in Lisbon. Currently, she is writing the biography of Cesário Verde.
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Mark Lewisohn
Mark Lewisohn is the acknowledged world authority on the Beatles. His books include Tune In (which is the first volume in his historical trilogy The Beatles: All These Years) as well as the bestselling and influential Recording Sessions, The Complete Beatles Chronicle and (as co-author) The Beatles’ London. He was consultant and researcher for all aspects – TV, DVDs, CDs and book – of The Beatles Anthology. A photographer in the little spare time he allows, his work appears in the photo book An Englishman In Mons.
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Patricia Lockwood
Patricia Lockwood is the author of four books, including the 2021 novel No One Is Talking About This, an international bestseller, winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize, finalist for the Booker Prize, and translated into 30 languages. Her 2017 memoir Priestdaddy won the Thurber Prize for American Humor and was named one of the Guardian’s 100 best books of the 21st century. She also has two poetry collections, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals (2014) and Balloon Pop Outlaw Black (2012). Lockwood’s work has appeared in The New York Times, the New Yorker, and the London Review of Books, where she is a contributing editor. She lives in Savannah, Georgia.
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Richard Zenith
Settled in Portugal for more than 30 years, Richard Zenith is a writer, translator and renowned expert on the life and work of Fernando Pessoa. He was the organiser of The Book of Disquiet and many other works by Pessoa, published by Assírio & Alvim, the author of a photo-biography of Pessoa, and co-curator of the exhibition Fernando Pessoa: Plural Como o Universo [Fernando Pessoa: As Multifarious As the Universe] (São Paulo, 2010; Rio de Janeiro, 2011; Lisbon, 2012). He has translated various works by Pessoa into English, as well as Galician-Portuguese folk songs, Camões, Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, among others. He was awarded the Pessoa Prize in 2012. In 2022, he published Pessoa: Uma Biografia [Pessoa: A Biography], rated as one of the best books of 2021 by several publications – The New York Times, The Spectator, The New Statesman, Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly – and shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize 2022.
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Ruy Castro
Ruy Castro is the author of more than 50 books, including biographies, such as The Pornographic Angel (1992) about the writer Nelson Rodrigues, Estrela Solitary (1995) on the football player Garrincha and Carmen – A Biography (2005) on the singer Carmen Miranda, as well as historical reconstitution books, such as Chega de Saudade (1990), The Night of My Good (2015) and Metrópole à Beira-Mar (2019). He has won the Jabuti Literature Prize seven times. In 2022 he was elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters, from which he also received the Machado de Assis Prize, for his lifetime of work.
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Sarah Bakewell
Sarah Bakewell had a wandering childhood, growing up on the “hippie trail” through Asia and in Australia. She studied philosophy at the University of Essex and worked for many years as a curator of early printed books at the Wellcome Library, London, before becoming a full-time writer. Her books include How to Live: a life of Montaigne, which won the Duff Cooper Prize and the US National Book Critics Circle Prize, and At the Existentialist Café, a New York Times Ten Best Books of 2016. She was also among the winners of the 2018 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize. She still has a tendency to wander but is mostly to be found either in London or in Italy with her wife and their family of dogs and chickens.
Programme
10:00 / Opening with António Feijó, President of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
10:15 / Sarah Bakewell, author of "At the Existentialist Café" and a biography on Montaigne, talks with Alberto Arruda
11:30 / Maria Antónia Oliveira, author of "Alexandre O’Neil, Uma Biografia Literária", talks with Joana Matos Frias
— BREAK —15:00 / António Tomás, author of "Amílcar Cabral, o Fazedor de Utopias", talks with Bárbara Reis
16:00 / Richard Zenith, author of "Pessoa. A Biography", talks with Nuno Amado
17:00 / Patricia Lockwood, author of the memoir "Priestdaddy", talks with Maria Sequeira Mendes
10:00 / Heather Clark, author of "Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath", talks with Isabel Lucas
11:30 / Mark Lewisohn, author of "The Beatles: All These Years", talks with Nuno Galopim
— BREAK —15:00 / Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, authors of Metaphysical Animals, talk with Sofia Miguens
17:00 / Ruy de Castro, author of biographies on Carmen Miranda, Garrincha or Nelson Rodrigues, talks with Ricardo Araújo Pereira
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