The number of the living

The re-establishment of a literary heritage that imposes a certain linearity on Romance writing, combined with the incorporation of elements of contemporary narrative ranging from García Márquez and Carpentier to the novellas of Agustina Bessa-Luís, with a tendency to surprise the reader with the supernatural in the everyday life of provincial and bourgeois society, or to bring into Romance writing the realm in which the social dimension of human relationships intersects with religiosity, superstition and even the irrational.

She made her debut in poetry in 1981 with "O Separar das Águas". "O Número dos Vivos" followed in 1982. The novella "Montedemo", staged by the group O Bando, brought the author a certain notoriety. In fact, Hélia Correia revealed early on her taste for theatre and classical Greece, which led her to perform in Oedipus Rex and to write "Perdição", both staged in 1993 by Comuna. 

She also wrote "Florbela" in 1991, which was later staged by the group Maizum. Her novels "Casa Eterna" and "Soma", and her poetry collection "A Pequena Morte/Esse Eterno Conto", also stand out in her body of work.

In 2002, she received the 2001 PEN Prize for fiction for her work Lillias Fraser, and in 2006 the Máxima Literature Prize for her work Bastardia.

It would be good if the Camões Prize, awarded to her in 2015, helped draw attention to the work of Hélia Correia, an author who shuns the spotlight and one of the great voices of contemporary Portuguese literature.

Hélia Correia (1949) is a contemporary Portuguese writer. She holds a degree in Romance Philology and is a secondary school Portuguese teacher. Despite her taste for poetry, she is recognised as a fiction writer and one of the revelations of the 1980s generation of Portuguese novellists, although her short stories, novellas and novels are always imbued with poetic discourse.