Biography
He is the great-great grandson of the writer Eça de Queiroz, considered the father of the modern Portuguese novel and dreamed of becoming a writer since very early age, encouraged by his parents.
But this family legacy was also a curse for Afonso Reis Cabral because he has been confronted with him ever since the publication of his first novel.
In 2014 Alfonso won one of the most prestigious and highly endowed literary prizes in the Portuguese-speaking world Prémio Leya with his debut novel O Meu Irmão at just 24.
His next book "Pão de Açúcar" is based on a real case that shook Portugal in February 2006. A group of youths from a home in Porto nearly beat a seriously ill Brazilian transgender woman to death and threw her surviving body into the waterhole of a ruined building.
Ten years later, Afonso Cabral found an article about the horrific murder and decided to follow it. From the point of view of 12-year-old Rafael, Cabral tells a highly exciting story that takes place on the fringes of Portuguese society.
Afonso Cabral was not much older than the main characters in his novel at the time of the real crime. And he lived like them in the port city of Port but had little in common with the experiences of his protagonists. Yet, he managed to write a psychologically sensitive novel about the inability to love.
Cabral has been elected president of the Eça de Queiroz Foundation.
His next book "Pão de Açúcar" is based on a real case that shook Portugal in February 2006. A group of youths from a home in Porto nearly beat a seriously ill Brazilian transgender woman to death and threw her surviving body into the waterhole of a ruined building.
Ten years later, Afonso Cabral found an article about the horrific murder and decided to follow it. From the point of view of 12-year-old Rafael, Cabral tells a highly exciting story that takes place on the fringes of Portuguese society.
Afonso Cabral was not much older than the main characters in his novel at the time of the real crime. And he lived like them in the port city of Port but had little in common with the experiences of his protagonists. Yet, he managed to write a psychologically sensitive novel about the inability to love.
Cabral has been elected president of the Eça de Queiroz Foundation.