Jorge Amado

Jorge Leal Amado de Faria ( ZHOR-zhee; Brazilian Portuguese: [ˈʒɔʁʒi aˈmadu]; 10 August 1912 – 6 August 2001), known as Jorge Amado, was a Brazilian writer of the modernist school. He remains the best-known of modern Brazilian writers, with his work having been translated into some 49 languages and popularized in film, including Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands in 1976, and having been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature at least seven times. His work reflects the image of a Mestiço Brazil and is marked by religious syncretism. He depicted a cheerful and optimistic country that was beset, at the same time, with deep social and economic differences.

He occupied the 23rd chair of the Brazilian Academy of Letters from 1961 until his death in 2001. He won the 1984 International Nonino Prize in Italy. He also was Federal Deputy for São Paulo as a member of the Brazilian Communist Party between 1947 and 1951.

Amado was born on Saturday, 10 August 1912, on a farm near the inland city of Itabuna, in the south of the Brazilian state of Bahia. He was the eldest of four sons of João Amado de Faria and D. Eulália Leal. The farm was located in the village of Ferradas, which, though today is a district of Itabuna, was at the time administered by the coastal city of Ilhéus. For this reason, he considered himself a citizen of Ilhéus. From his exposure to the large cocoa plantations of the area, Amado knew the misery and the struggles of the people working the land and living in almost enslaved conditions. This was to be a theme present in several of his works, for example, The Violent Land of 1944.

As a result of a smallpox epidemic, his family moved to Ilhéus when he was one year old, and he spent his childhood there. He attended high school in Salvador, the capital of the state. By the age of 14 Amado had begun to collaborate with several magazines and took part in literary life, as one of the founders of the Modernist "Rebels' Academy".

He was the cousin of Brazilian lawyer, writer, journalist and politician Gilberto Amado, and of Brazilian actress and screenwriter Véra Clouzot.

Amado published his first novel, The Country of Carnival, in 1931, aged 18. He married Matilde Garcia Rosa and had a daughter, Lila, in 1933. The same year he published his second novel, Cacau, which increased his popularity.

He studied law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro Faculty of Law but never became a practising lawyer. His leftist activities made his life difficult under the dictatorial regime of Getúlio Vargas. In 1935 he was arrested for the first time, and two years later his books were publicly burned. His works were banned from Portugal, but in the rest of Europe, he gained great popularity with the publication of Jubiabá in France. The book received enthusiastic reviews, including that of Nobel Prize winner French author Albert Camus.

In his final years, Amado suffered from diabetes. On 5 August 2001, he was admitted to Hospital Aliança in Salvador (Bahia), where he died at the 19:30 BRT of the next day of heart and lung failure, four days before his 89th birthday. His ashes were spread in the garden of his house four days later.

On 4 December 2014, he received (posthumously) from the Legislative Assembly of Bahia appointment as Commander of Meritorious Citizen of the Freedom and Social Justice João Mangabeira (CBJM), the State's highest honour, due to his work in defence of social rights.

On 20 October 2017, a newly-discovered species of frog from Bahia, Phyllodytes amadoi, was named in his honor. The discoverers of this species noted that in addition to living in the same area as the species' type locality, Amado was a lifelong frog enthusiast - over the course of his life, he had acquired a large collection of frog-themed souvenirs from around the world, some of which remain on display at his home in Salvador to this day.

The Casa do Rio Vermelho, located at 33 Rua Alagoinhas in Salvador's Rio Vermelho neighbourhood, was the residence of the writers Jorge Amado and Zélia Gattai. The couple acquired the house in 1960 with money from the sale of the film rights to Amado's novel Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The residence became an important meeting place for artists, writers and intellectuals, receiving visitors such as Glauber Rocha, Pablo Neruda, Tom Jobim, Dorival Caymmi, Roman Polanski, Jack Nicholson, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. After the residence ceased to be occupied, the property was transformed into a memorial dedicated to the life and work of Amado and Gattai, opening to the public in 2014. The memorial preserves the original characteristics of the residence and displays personal objects, photographs, documents and correspondence, as well as audiovisual installations; its garden contains the ashes of both writers.