Eliana Machado

   Hello to all. Welcome to the writer Eliana Machados’s webpage. Some of you already know me a little because you have already visited this page, but to others my works are as yet I am unknown. So, let me present myself in the order of events.

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   I have always lived with my head in the fairy tale world. The backyard which I liked playing in the most was the stage. While young, I walked with my dad to a mythical place where half a century before was held the Week of Modern Art, in the Municipal Theatre of São Paulo, and where he earned our daily bread singing in the opera. While he worked, I stayed in the aisle watching the artists going back and forth. And when they needed children in the background, I also became an actress. Inside the underground labyrinth, I fluttered along narrow corridors, peeking inside those dressing rooms, that baroque universe inhabited by exaggeratedly made-up actors and anachronistic clothes; I dreamed, sometimes, in being like those heavenly ballerinas who strutted around in their tutus, or like one of the musicians of the symphonic orchestra, who, for a child, played very extravagant musical instruments like bassoons, bass guitars and tubas.

 

   From the aisles of childhood, I went to literature during adolescence. I started writing short stories, probably inspired by two collections in our library: An Illustrated Anthology of Brazilian Folklore and Tales and Legends by The Grimm Brothers. Most of these compositions from my youth were lost during our moving from house to house, or just thrown in the garbage by my mom, whose good intentions were just to avoid the cockroaches' and moths' proliferation at home. These creatures were my first “readers”. On our last move, I discovered that not all the papers of the past had been recycled, a diploma that I received in a contest sponsored by the Education Board when I was ten years old had been saved. The awarded work was related to ecology, a theme which at that time already occupied my thoughts. From prose I went to poetry. At sixteen years old, a poem of mine was read on one of the local radio stations. It was a kind of requiem to a dear friend who died tragically during my childhood.

 

   At the end of my adolescence, another of my favourite hobbies, besides writing, was to read biographies from famous Brazilian authors. Each trajectory of every one of them amazed me, both their successes and their failures. It was at about that time I discovered making a living as a writer would be almost impossible.  

Before I graduated in Languages and Literature in Spanish, Portuguese and Russian at the “University of São Paulo” (USP), I already gave classes in Portuguese and Spanish in public and private education. I received many scholarships from foreign governments, but it was the Spanish Agency for International Co-operation and Development (AECID) that took me to Madrid, in January 1993. This is how I came to Europe. From Don Quixote’s country I moved to Victor Hugo’s, where I graduated in Literature. In 2004, I passed a public exam in France and I became a French and Spanish teacher. The next year, I started teaching in the Principality of Monaco, where I am still today.

 

   Dedicated to the work of a teacher, I started translating Brazilian novels until I decided it was about time for me to publish my own works. From then until now, between prose and poetry, I have published 7 books, which you will have, undoubtedly, the curiosity of reading. I participated in numerous events both in The United States and Switzerland, passing, evidently, by Brazil. Some of them are accessible on this website. I received several awards for my work, like: Best Foreign Author award in 2014, given by the French Press Union (UPF) from Monaco, and the Literary Excellence award 2016, given by The United World Spanish Writers Association (UHE). I launched my career as an editor in 2015, publishing a bilingual poetic anthology (French-Spanish), by six contemporary South American poets.

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   From the time of my childhood I kept in the back of my mind the fairy tale world, because as Baudelaire was used to saying:  

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   “La faculté de rêverie est une faculté divine et mystérieuse; car c'est par le rêve que l'homme communique avec le monde ténébreux dont il est environné.”

                                                                             (Charles Baudelaire, Les Paradis artificiels, 1860.) 

   “The act of dreaming, is a divine and mysterious act; because it is by a dream that man communicates with the gloomy world which surrounds him.” (Baudelaire, our translation)