Thousand Thoughts in Flight

Maria Gabriela Llansol (1931-2008) is a singular figure in Portuguese literature, one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, yet never before translated into English. Although entirely unknown in the United States, she twice won the award for best novel from the Portuguese Writers’ Association with her textually idiosyncratic, fragmentary, and densely poetic writing; other recipients of this prize include José Saramago and António Lobos Antunes. Upon her death in 2008, she left behind twenty-seven published books and more than seventy unpublished notebooks, all of which evade any traditional definitions of genre. Deep Vellum published her trilogy Geography of Rebels, in English translation by Audrey Young, in 2018.Audrey Young is a translator, researcher, and archivist. She received a Fulbright grant to research non-theatrical film in Portugal and studied Portuguese language and culture at the University of Lisbon with a scholarship from the Instituto Camões. She has worked at the Getty Research Institute, the Cineteca Nacional México, and the Arquivo Nacional do Brasil, among other archives.

"Playful and fragmentary and wonderfully free.” —TLS“Llansol is a generous and poetic writer, sensual in her descriptions and intensely attuned to the metaphysical and the otherworldly, coalescing history, philosophy, and physical experience; these qualities are boldly apparent in her fiction, but appear with an experimental and kinetic mode in these diaries.” —Asymptote Journal