Last modified: Wednesday, September 30, 2009
IU professor Sadlier receives award for her book on Brazilian author Graciliano Ramos
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Sept. 30, 2009
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Darlene Sadlier, director of the Portuguese Program and a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University, has won first place in the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs International Competition for best monograph on the writer Graciliano Ramos.
Winning first place in the competition means she will receive a cash prize of $20,000 and a trip to Brazil for the awards ceremony in October. In addition, her monograph, titled "Reading Graciliano Ramos in the United States," will be published by the Brazilian government in both English and Portuguese. She was notified of her award by João Almino, consul general of Brazil in Chicago.
Graciliano Ramos, born in 1892, is widely considered one of the most important Brazilian novelists of the 20th century. He was a seminal voice in the literary "regionalism" movement. Many of his works explore the lives of characters shaped by the rural misery of northeastern Brazil, most notably Vidas Secas.
In 1933, he published his first book, Caetés. A few years later he was jailed by the right-wing Getúlio Vargas government, on a charge that was never made clear. His experiences in jail would become a unique personal deposition in his posthumous Memórias do Cárcere. He published 11 books during his lifetime and a last book, Viagem, appeared after his 1953 death.
Sadlier, who has taught in IU's College of Arts and Sciences since 1978, earned her bachelor of arts degree from Kent State and her master's and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Wisconsin. Her areas of specialty are Brazilian and Portuguese literatures and cultures, Latin American cinema and gender studies.
Her most recent books are Brazil Imagined: 1500 to the Present (2008) and Latin American Melodrama: Passion, Pathos, and Entertainment (2009).
