A Room of One's Own

17 Jan - 31 Jan 2025

Nara Vidal, a Brazilian writer and translator, debuts the International Collaboration Atelier programme, which provides conditions for creation, research and exchange for artists on professional visits to Portugal at the initiative of partner cultural institutions.

The author of the novels Sorte (Oceanos Prize) and Puro (APCA Prize), is working on a non-fiction literary project to be published by Zahar, an imprint of the Companhia das Letras group, in 2026. The book, currently in development, takes Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own as a starting point to analyse writing by women over the roughly 100 years since the English author's essay was published. Themes such as the professionalisation of a writer's work, housing conditions, thematic limitations, and male interference — ranging from censorship and the cutting of original texts in posthumous editions to plagiarism — are part of her investigation.

For Nara, "being at Casa Mísia puts into practice several points raised in the project, such as the access to the library and lifestyle of Mísia, a free, feminist person who, like most female artists, suffered intimidation and misunderstanding from others due to her originality. Being in residency also speaks directly to the proposal that seeks to examine the experience of women writers who 'abandoned' the convention of home and family to have the time and space to create".