Virtually Yours #19
José Luis Mendonça

A series of online discussions - Virtual Gatherings - with the award-winning author Ondjaki, exploring contemporary African Literature with authors.

José Luís Mendonça
shares his public life among literature, university teaching, journalism and cultural activism for the promotion of books and reading.
The writer was born in 1955, in Golungo Alto, Angola, and made his appearance in the world of Letters with the poetry book "Chuva Novembrina", a work to which the Sagrada Esperança Prize was awarded in 1981.
In 2015, he was awarded the National Prize for Culture and Arts in the Literature category.
In 2018, he refound the Movement of New Intellectuals of Angola, originally born in 1948, for the rescue of the legacy of the forerunners of Angolan literature.
He directed and edited the Jornal CULTURA, the Angolan fortnight of Arts & Letters for seven years.
2021 he won the SADC Journalism Award as a cultural journalist in the press category.

His book “As Metamorfoses do Elefante ” will be discussed during the meeting. On the eve of Angola's independence, the seven dreams of Hermes Sussumuku reveal a future of horrors. The Metamorphosis of the Elephant begins with the spread of a strange pandemic: an outbreak of laughter that the authorities call surriso. Simultaneously with this unusual pandemic, the author, José Luís Mendonça, offers us a prodigious effabulation of the history of post-colonial Angola.
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