Only the Dead Have Been to Mafra

António Lobo Antunes, who has been called “one of Portugal’s preeminent writers” by The New York Times, was born in Lisbon in 1942. The son of a physician, he too became a doctor and then spent four years in the Portuguese Army during the Angolan War. His book on that war, South of Nowhere (Random House, 1983, trans. Elizabeth Lowe), was internationally praised and followed by other widely translated and much-honored novels, including An Explanation of the Birds (Grove, 1995, trans. Richard Zenith), Act of the Damned (Grove, 1996, trans. Richard Zenith), and The Natural Order of Things (Grove, 2001, trans Richard Zenith).

Jeremy Klemin’s writing and literary translations have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic, The New Republic, AGNI, The Common, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. Klemin has attended the Tin House Summer Workshop, and his work has been supported by grants from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Disquiet International Literary Program, where he was a Luso-American Fellow. He holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from Oregon State University.