Pessoa writer and researcher Teresa Rita Lopes has died at the age of 87

Born in Faro on September 12, 1937, Teresa Rita Lopes was one of the most dedicated researchers in Pessoa studies and also an author of poetry, short stories and plays, having won several awards throughout her career, according to the biographical data on the Presença website.

Between 1963 and 1982 she lived in Paris, France, where she was a professor at the University of the Sorbonne Nouvelle and where she defended her doctoral thesis entitled "Fernando Pessoa and the symbolist drama -- inheritance and creation".

The author from the Algarve left the country in 1963, when she was being persecuted by the PIDE, the political police of the dictatorship, going into exile in France, until returning to dedicate herself to studying thousands of documents from Fernando Pessoa's estate, at a time when the poet was still little known internationally.

Teresa Rita Lopes took charge of producing new editions of Pessoa's work, publishing multiple works from the universe of the poet who died in 1935.

The writer became known for, during the Estado Novo period, having contributed to preventing the writer's estate from leaving the country to be sold in England, as she reported in an interview with Postal do Algarve in 2020, in which she stressed: "There is still a lot of Pessoa to make known".

In Teresa Rita Lopes' career, titles such as "Cicatriz" (1996, Eça de Queirós Prize), "The Fingers, the Days, the Words" (1987), and "Stories of the South" (2005) stand out.

She was also a full professor of Comparative Literature at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, and co-director of the Portuguese-language poetry magazine Orion.

Other awards given to the poet and essayist were the Lisbon City Prize (1988 for poetry), the Pen Club Prize (1990, essay), the Unicer/Letras e Letras Grand Essay Prize (1989, essay) and the Portuguese Writers Association Theatre Prize 2001.

In the area of ​​theatre, she has written more than 20 plays, some of which have won awards, but only four have been published to date, according to the Manuel Viegas Guerreiro Foundation, based in Querença, Loulé, which recalled the tribute paid in 2017, during the Querença International Literary Festival, and highlighting the "human and intellectual qualities" of Teresa Rita Lopes.

According to the foundation, the author's wake is scheduled for 3:30 pm today at the Nossa Senhora Fátima Church, in Feijó, with the funeral taking place on Tuesday at 1 pm for cremation at the Vale Flores Cemetery in the same location in the municipality of Almada.

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