José Eduardo Agualusa
b. 1960 · Angolan novelist and journalist
José Eduardo Agualusa (born 1960 in Huambo, Angola) is an Angolan novelist and journalist who writes in Portuguese. He belongs to the generation often grouped under contemporary African literature, and his fiction returns again and again to the question of how stories can rebuild a past that official accounts have neglected.
He was born in Huambo to white Portuguese settlers. He trained in agronomy and forestry in Lisbon, but he soon turned to writing and journalism. He has contributed to newspapers and has hosted a radio programme on African music and poetry. He moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1998 and has lived in Luanda since 2004. In 2006 he helped launch Língua Geral, a publisher devoted to authors writing in Portuguese.
His first published work, in the early 1990s, included short fiction and poetry. His novels often mix historical events with invention. Rainy Season draws on the real disappearance of an Angolan poet and historian in Luanda, while Creole imagines a secret love between a character created by the nineteenth-century novelist Eça de Queiroz and a former slave who became one of the wealthiest people in Angola. His style combines lyricism, humour and a streak of surrealism, and his recurring concerns are memory and the ways societies choose to forget.
His wider recognition came with The Book of Chameleons, which won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2007, and with A General Theory of Oblivion, shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2016. A Portuguese critic has praised his skill at linking history and fiction. Through his work and its translations, especially into English, he has helped bring Angolan literature to readers beyond the Portuguese-speaking world.
Key works
- Rainy Season (1996): a novel built around the mysterious disappearance of an Angolan poet and historian in Luanda.
- Creole (1997): a story of a clandestine love affair in nineteenth-century Angola between a fictional adventurer and a former slave.
- My Father's Wives (2007): a novel about a family and the secrets that hold it together, told with a light and fantastical touch.
- The Book of Chameleons (2004): a novel about a man who sells made-to-measure pasts to his clients.
- A General Theory of Oblivion (2012): a retelling of Angolan history through a woman who shuts herself inside her Luanda apartment for three decades.
Curiosities
A landmark prize
In 2007 he won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for *The Book of Chameleons*. According to the reference material, he was the first African writer to receive the award since it was founded in 1990.
A title reused
When the novel was translated into English, Agualusa and his translator agreed on the title *The Book of Chameleons*. He liked it so much that he later used it in Portuguese for a collection of short stories, *O Livro dos Camaleões*.
Original Filopedia text based on Wikipedia (es) and Wikipedia (en) and Wikidata.