Clarice Lispector

Lispector was born in Chechelnyk, in what is now Ukraine, to a Jewish family fleeing pogroms; the family reached Brazil when she was an infant, settling first in Recife and then Rio de Janeiro. She trained as a lawyer, married a diplomat, and spent much of her twenties and thirties abroad in Naples, Bern, and Washington, publishing her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, at twenty-three.

A 1966 fire in her Rio apartment, started by a dropped cigarette after she took a sleeping pill, badly burned her writing hand and left permanent scars, an accident friends later read into her fiction's fascination with bodily rupture. She had written The Passion According to G.H. two years earlier, dissolving a woman's identity into a single crushed cockroach.

Increasingly reclusive in Rio, she died there in 1977, the day before her fifty-seventh birthday.