Biography
Susana Moreira Marques is the author of four books of literary non-fiction, most recently Third Floor, Stairs Only: Notes from Lisbon, as well as one children’s book. Her first book, Now and at the Hour of Our Death, was translated into English, Spanish and French and was a Book of the Year in the New York Times. Her work has appeared in Granta, Tin House, Literary Hub and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships from the Gabriel García Márquez Foundation (Colombia), the Jan Michalski Foundation (Switzerland) and Art Omi (US), amongst others. As a journalist, she worked for the BBC World Service, Público, Jornal de Negócios, Antena 1 and won several prizes, including the UNESCO Human Rights and Integration Journalism Award (Portugal). One of the editors of the literary magazine Mamute, she also writes for cinema. She lives in Lisbon with her two daughters.
More Info
- Read more about ‘one of the best books ever written about the meaning of life’s end’, Now and at the Hour of Our Death, published by And Other Stories in 2015.
- Susanna Moreira Marques discusses grief and Now and the the Hour of Our Death for BBC World Service.
Reviews
Leslie Jamison
‘Raymond Carver once wrote about loving everything that increases me. This book increased me. It is fearless and luminous and full of grace; it travels to the edge of death and finds life there. Its attention to the particulars of love—between the ones who will go and the ones they will leave—is something close to sublime.’ Leslie Jamison also chose Now and at the Hour of Our Death as her New York Times Book of the Year.
Times Literary Supplement
‘[An] affecting reflection on death . . . Marques's interviews achieve a stark authenticity.’
New Internationalist
‘A beautiful mediation on life and death . . . [Moreira Marques’] writing shows that there is poetry in the most unexpected places.’
Gavin Francis, author of Adventures in Human Being
‘A tender, lyrical and intimate meditation on death and bereavement, examining dispossession, the fury of grief and the end we all will face. Now and at the Hour of our Death is written with great compassion, and with the economy and precision usually reserved for poetry.’
Iona Heath, author of Matters of Life and Death: Key Writings
‘The writing of Susana Moreira Marques has the quiet intensity and the transformative power of poetry. She describes, in tender detail, the dying of people and the slow dying of a remote rural community, the one superimposed on the other.’
Anne Karpf, author of How to Age
‘Moreira Marques has the ability to evoke an entire lifespan in a few words or sentences, summoning an individual through a brief experience, event or gesture . . . Her great achievement is to situate dying so squarely within life itself. She liberates death and dying back into the messy business of living.’
Isabel Lucas
Público
‘A brilliant book which pushes the boundaries, not only of literary reportage but of literary genres in general, to discuss that most intimate of moments: death . . . Death isn't good or bad, death is; and Susana Moreira Marques writes about it in her first book in a way that can only be done by great writers.’
Big Issue North
‘An intriguing work of non-fiction, Marques takes a fresh look at death through the eyes of a palliative care team. With great compassion she listens to those facing death and recounts their stories in their own words.’
Laura Garmeson
3:AM Magazine
'To read Now and at the Hour of our Death is to better recognise the glitzy clichés and ragged euphemisms with which we dress up our mortality, and when to value or discard them. It is to embrace the fact that we are not gods. It is to define a good death. It is to “know you are a machine and not feel saddened but, rather, liberated by the thought”. It is to travel to the land of malady, and back again.'
Booktrust
‘A beautifully crafted, powerful meditation on the nature of existence’.
Akanos
‘A slim volume with not a syllable wasted’.
Nudge
‘Some of the individual aphorisms wonderfully encapsulate the sense of lost control that death brings, and the relief of getting back to the basics of breath and beauty’.
Kate Gardner
For Books' Sake
‘The amount to which Moreira Marques manages to get these strangers to open up to her is remarkable’.
Julian Hanna
Minor Literatures
‘Marques has written a restless, formally experimental book – translated with beautiful subtlety by Julia Sanches – that also manages to convey the emotions she experienced on her journey.’
Alex Kalamaroff
Entropy Magazine
‘For Moreira Marques, what divinity there is can be found only in the quiet beauty that would otherwise go unnoticed, in that artist’s refuge, the details.’
The Lady
‘The writing is compassionate but unsentimental, taking in the bodily indignities of death alongside the beauty of the landscape and a vanishing way of life.’
José Mário Silva
Expresso
‘An extremely rare event: a book capable of creating its own form, inventing on the way a new literary genre.’
Ana Dias Ferreira
Time Out Lisbon
‘One of the best books ever written about the meaning of life’s end.’