Adélia Prado

Adélia Luzia Prado Freitas (born 13 December 1935) is a Brazilian writer and poet.

Life She was born in Divinópolis, Minas Gerais (one of the landlocked states of Brazil), where she still lives. Her family were railroad laborers, and both her mother and grandmother died during childbirth. She was the first member of her family to attend university, gaining degrees in Philosophy and Religious Education from the University of Divinópolis. She taught school until 1979, and was the Cultural Liaison for the City of Divinópolis from 1983 to 1988.

Literary career Her poetry was "discovered" in 1976, when at the age of 40 she sent a small collection of her poems to poet Affonso Romano de Sant’Anna. De Sant'Anna passed her work on to the Brazilian modernist poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade, who read it and proclaimed in his weekly newspaper column Her work is a seeming paradox of a deep and spiritual Catholicism combined with the physical and the carnal. She herself has tried to resolve this contradiction, writing that "It's the soul that's erotic."

Though she does her best to avoid the limelight, Prado is considered one of Brazil's foremost poets. Her work has been translated into English, Italian, and Spanish, and has been written about extensively in the critical and popular press in Brazil.

In 2000, Adélia was featured in the prestigious Brazilian "Cadernos de Literatura Brasileira" produced by the Moreira Salles Institute.

Prado was a featured reader at FLIP (Paraty International Literary Festival) in 2006, an event that drew large interest to her work.

In 2014, she received the Griffin Lifetime Recognition Award, presented by the trustees of the Griffin Poetry Prize.