Rachel de Queiroz

Queiroz published The Fifteen, her drought novel, at nineteen, and briefly joined Brazil's Communist Party in her twenties before breaking with it decisively and becoming one of the country's most prominent conservative voices for the rest of her life.

She worked for decades as a journalist and playwright, writing a widely read newspaper column and translating foreign plays for the Brazilian stage, alongside a steady output of novels grounded in her native Ceará and its recurring droughts.

Recognized only in 1977 as the first woman inducted into the Brazilian Academy of Letters, eighty years after its founding, she also received the Camões Prize, the Portuguese language's highest literary honor, and kept writing into her nineties.