Rebellion
Cristina Carvalho
April 2018
Rebellion is Portuguese literary celebrity Cristina Carvalho’s international debut. Born a rebel, Lena escapes her provincial existence and heads for Lisbon as a young woman to make a more exciting life for herself. Once there, though, she makes a series of fateful decisions--spending a night in a brothel, embarking on a marriage she lives to regret, longing instead for the blue-eyed man of her dreams.
Author:
Cristina Carvalho was born in Lisbon in 1949, female, an inhabitant of planet Earth and, as it turned out, a writer. Many of her books have been included in Portugal’s National Reading Plan for students at different levels. Her fictional biography of Modigliani (Planeta, 2015) won the Portuguese Society of Authors’ 2016 Prize for best novel and is published in French by Linda Leith Éditions (2018). Rebellion is the first of her books to appear in English. [Photo: José Lorvão]
Translator:
The eldest child of historian and writer Ruben Andresen Leitão, and an English mother, herself a fine translator, Alexandra Andresen Leitão grew up in Lisbon and completed her school and university education in England prior to launching her career as a translator. She has lived in the city of Porto since 1993. Her prodigious memory and cosmopolitan background inform her often incisive writing in numerous subtle ways, as evidenced by her translation of Cristina Carvalho's novel, Rebellion.
Copy-editor:
Based in Portugal since 2008, Allison Wright is a German, French and Portuguese to English translator and English editor with over thirty years' experience. Although Allison specialises in corporate communications and she has an in-depth knowledge of viticulture, her many interests—like her life—defy neat description. She and the translator of Rebellion have worked together on several projects during the last seven years.
Cover artist:
Alexandra de Pinho works from her studio in Santa Maria da Feira, in the north of Portugal. The very personal language that has become her signature derives from the expressivity of her art combined with the materials and techniques chosen. The textures, the composition of the drawings, their balance and chromatic representation are a direct result of her familiarity with these media – which, in turn, is signaled by the use of fragments from everyday clothes and the lines sewn into the work, tracing their physicality. Alexandra has a degree in Painting from the Fine Arts Faculty of Oporto University, a post-graduate degree from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Barcelona, and has also studied at the University of Vigo Fine Arts Faculty in Pontevedra.
This translation in funded by the General Directorate for Books, Archives and Libraries / Portugal.