Dissolves the boundaries between fantasy and reality

Offsets the serious with playfulness and absurd humour

This text was written in 2004 by members of the award jury.

Lygia Bojunga is part of the tradition of magical realism and fantasy-filled storytelling of South America, a tradition she has developed and perfected. In her word of mouth-style narratives, characterised by a strongly dramatic presence, anything can happen. In a deeply original way she fuses playfulness, poetic beauty and absurd humour with social critique, a love of freedom and a strong empathy with the vulnerable child. Fantasy often functions as a way of dealing with distressing personal experiences, or as an escape from harsh reality.

Bojunga enables the reader to enter directly into the dreams of her principal characters and to share in their experiences. At the age of eight Bojunga moved to Rio, where in 1951 she became an actress in a theatre group that toured the rural areas of Brazil. Her reaction to the widespread illiteracy she encountered prompted her to become one of the founders of a school for poor rural children which she helped to run for five years. She spent a long time working in radio and television before making her debut as a children's writer in 1972.

In her first children’s book Os Colegas (1972), as in Angélica (1975), the main characters are animals endowed with human characteristics, a device that highlights the comic elements in the narrative. These early works already reveal a psychological focus: Angélica is about a pig that wants to be a swallow, but gradually learns to accept its own identity. A Bolsa Amarela (1976), highlights a similar theme, this time with a young girl in the leading role, whereas A Casa da Madrinha (1978) presents the utopian dreams and fantasies of an abandoned street child. Two of her books deal with mourning and grief: her masterpiece, Corda Bamba (1979), is about a young girl who manages to come to terms with the death of her parents through her fantasies, and in O Meu Amigo Pintor (1987), a young boy reflects on the inexplicable suicide of an adult friend.

For Bojunga, magic permeates the everyday: an everyday where desires grow so heavy that one literally cannot lift them, where safety pins and umbrellas talk, as do spinning tops and balls. The lives of animals are as varied and as vulnerable as those of any human being. The child's point of view is also always paramount in Bojunga's texts. She views the world with the imaginative gaze of a child at play. Magical realism and acute psychological observation are combined with a passion for democracy and social justice. Bojunga, who started writing when Brazil was still under the iron grip of dictatorship, is something of a subversive. This was easier to express in children's literature, given that, in Bojunga's own words, "Generals don't read children's books." She has the ability of the live storyteller to engage the reader from the very first page. Bojunga has also written plays, and often employs a theatrical narrative style and skilfully maintains a fine balance between the humorous and the serious.

In books such as Seis Vezez Lucas (1995), Bojunga writes in an altogether more realistic style. In her latest work, Retratos de Carolina (2002), her continual experimentation as a writer has led her in a new direction: she allows us to follow the main character from childhood through to adulthood in a narrative partly written in the form of a meta-novel. Bojunga uses this device to extend the boundaries of literature for children and young people in an attempt, as she herself puts it, to make room both for herself and the characters she has created in one single house, "a house of my own invention".

Bojunga's work has been translated into a number of languages including English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, Bulgarian, Czech and Hebrew. She has won a number of awards, including the Jabuti Award (1973), the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Award (1982), and the Rattenfänger Literaturpreis (1986).