Clarice Lispector

Lispector was born in a village in western Ukraine during the pogroms that followed the First World War and was carried to Brazil as a baby; her mother, who had been raped in the violence, died when Clarice was nine. She grew up in Recife and Rio speaking Portuguese as her only language, and always insisted she was Brazilian, though her odd sibilant speech made strangers ask where she was from. She published her first novel at twenty-three, and critics could not place it: it had almost no plot and was made of interior attention.

Her books — The Passion According to G.H., Água Viva, the late The Hour of the Star — put a mind under a microscope and find something close to religious terror in a cockroach, an egg, a bus ride. For years she wrote a newspaper column and answered readers' letters while raising two sons largely alone. In 1966 she fell asleep smoking; the fire badly burned her right hand, which she nearly lost. She died of ovarian cancer the day before her fifty-seventh birthday and was buried according to Jewish rite in the communal cemetery at Caju.