The Clarice Lispector Project

When Benjamin Moser encountered Clarice Lispector in a college Portuguese class in the late 1990s, she was virtually unknown outside Brazil. This chance discovery was the beginning of a labor of love that spanned two decades, and began with Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector (Oxford University Press, 2009). Praised by Colm Tóibín, Jonathan Franzen, Edmund White, and Orhan Pamuk, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the biography was the first sustained introduction of Lispector to an international audience — and the argument — surprising at first, but no longer — that she belonged in the company of Kafka, Joyce, and Woolf.

The biography was only the beginning. Named Series Editor at New Directions Publishing, Moser spent the following decade and a half overseeing and contributing to the first complete English translation of Lispector’s works: eleven volumes, involving a team of translators, and extending to her novels, stories, children’s literature, and journalism, revealing every facet of one of the greatest of modern writers. Editions appeared simultaneously through Penguin Modern Classics in the UK. Translated into dozens of languages, the project was described by Parul Sehgal in The New York Times as one of the true literary events of the twenty-first century. Brazil recognized the work in 2016 with its first-ever State Prize for Cultural Diplomacy, awarded by the Ministry of Foreign Relations. In 2021, Moser was elected to a lifelong chair at the Brazilian Academy of Letters.