Recently, I finally went to see the play Simply Me, Clarice Lispector, starring Beth Goulart, and found myself wondering how the enigmatic Brazilian author — whom I was assigned to read in school and who once challenged me, as a young reader, to appreciate such profound writing — is now, at last, becoming popular around the world.

For decades, Clarice Lispector occupied a paradoxical place in Brazilian literature: revered by critics and loyal readers, yet still considered “difficult,” “hermetic,” or “unclassifiable” by many. Her writing, deeply introspective and existential, resisted easy labels and often seemed out of step with the Brazilian modernist canon. Today, however, Clarice is experiencing a renaissance: new generations of readers, both in Brazil and abroad, are discovering the singular power of her voice — and seeing themselves in it.

This rediscovery is partly the result of editorial and critical work from the past two decades, such as the Complete Works published by Rocco, the monumental biography written by Benjamin Moser (Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, 2009), and carefully crafted translations of her novels into English, French, and other languages. But it also reflects the spirit of our time: in a world saturated with noise, Clarice offers a kind of literature that welcomes silence, thought, and radical sensitivity.

The writer who came from the “depths of being”

Clarice was born in Ukraine in 1920, into a Jewish family fleeing pogroms, and arrived in Brazil as a baby. She grew up in the Northeast and later moved to Rio de Janeiro. From an early age, she displayed a sharp and philosophical style of writing. Her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart (1943), written at just 23, had an immediate impact due to its innovative language and deep dive into the character’s inner world — something unusual in Brazilian literature at the time, still marked by regionalism.

Her writing was disruptive: she didn’t tell stories with a beginning, middle, and end, but captured epiphanies, silences, obsessions, and flashes of consciousness. Clarice wrote novels, short stories, chronicles, and even children’s books, always with a language that oscillated between poetic and metaphysical. Her sentences are like scalpels: precise, lyrical, and painfully revealing.

Clarice in the arts: film, theater, and television

The aesthetic and existential force of Clarice’s work has transcended the page and is increasingly explored in the performing and audiovisual arts. In the theater, she is a constant presence. The play starring actress Beth Goulart became a landmark, bringing the writer to Brazilian and international stages through a monologue constructed from her letters, chronicles, and novels. The performance is a sensitive and intense tribute that captures both Clarice’s pain and brilliance.

In cinema, her work has inspired direct adaptations and loose interpretations. The Hour of the Star (1985), directed by Suzana Amaral and starring Marcélia Cartaxo, introduced Clarice to a wider audience through the story of Macabéa, a poor northeastern girl living in Rio. The film won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. More recently, The Discovery of the World (2021), directed by Taciana Oliveira, delves into Clarice’s inner world through her chronicles.

On television, her work appears more subtly but still leaves a strong impression. In telenovelas, miniseries, and interviews, Clarice is often quoted, especially when there’s a need to express difficult emotions with poetic nuance. Special episodes of programs like Entrelinhas (TV Cultura) and Café Filosófico have explored her work in depth.

Cited by artists and cultural impact

Clarice has become a kind of literary “muse” for contemporary musicians, actresses, and visual artists. In 2025, Lorde, who released her new album Virgin, cited the writer as one of her sources of inspiration in “creating an accurate portrait of herself, whether or not she thought it was beautiful.” Madonna, in a 2010 interview, said she read Clarice while traveling in Brazil and described her as “a deeply spiritual writer.” Caetano Veloso has referenced Clarice in interviews and songs, and Fernanda Montenegro, one of Brazil’s greatest actresses, said that Clarice’s literature taught her how to listen to the “inner voice” of a character.

One of the most striking instances of international recognition came from Cate Blanchett, the two-time Academy Award-winning Australian actress. In recent interviews, Blanchett has spoken of her love for women writers who explore the depths of the human psyche, listing Clarice Lispector as one of her favorite authors. Blanchett once said that Clarice “writes as if she’s exposing a raw nerve” and expressed her desire to portray Lispector or adapt her work for film or stage. Her admiration was further confirmed when she took part in public readings of Latin American women writers — and included passages from The Passion According to G.H.

On social media, celebrities like Emma Watson and Chloë Grace Moretz have shared excerpts of Clarice’s writing, helping spread her influence to younger, global audiences. Contemporary writers such as Lina Meruane, Valeria Luiselli, and Sally Rooney have also cited Lispector as an influence or reference point.

Brazilian visual and performance artists such as Nuno Ramos, Lenora de Barros, and Laura Lima have created works inspired by Clarice or that dialogue with her fragmented, introspective language. In exhibitions and installations, she is evoked not just as an author but as a symbol of an unfinished, ineffable aesthetic.

Clarice today: social media, feminism, and the fragmented self

In recent years, Clarice Lispector has gained visibility on social media. Quotes attributed to her — often inaccurately — have gone viral, revealing a public hunger for dense, provocative phrases. This “meme-ification” of Clarice has been both a misunderstanding and a gateway. Many readers who discovered her through isolated phrases soon found a much deeper and more complex writer.

Clarice has also been embraced by contemporary feminist movements as an author who radically explored female experience, long before it was a trend or a political stance. In novels like The Passion According to G.H. (1964) and An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures (1969), she delves into the body, desire, motherhood, fear, and the search for identity — never in a didactic or pamphleteering way, but with rare philosophical and emotional force.

Today, authors like Rachel Cusk, Jenny Offill, Olga Tokarczuk, and even Annie Ernaux echo, however subtly, this Claricean tradition of narrating subjectivity in a state of crisis or expansion.

Translations, international recognition, and the Clarice “cult”

For a long time, Clarice was little known outside Brazil. This was partly due to the difficulty of translating her prose: her syntax-breaking, philosophically charged sentences often lost nuance in other languages. But in recent years, thanks to translators like Idra Novey, Alison Entrekin, and Johnny Lorenz, her work has found new life in English and other languages.

The publication of The Complete Stories (2015), edited by Benjamin Moser, was a turning point. The book received enthusiastic praise from critics such as Edmund White and The New York Times Book Review, which described Clarice as “one of the most mysterious writers of the 20th century.” Since then, she has been studied in universities across the U.S., Canada, the UK, France, and even Japan — not as a Latin American curiosity, but as an essential writer.

Clarice has come to occupy a position similar to Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, or Sylvia Plath: writers whose literature transcends genre, time, and geography. Today, she is the subject of book clubs, plays, academic theses, and cinematic adaptations.

Essential Works

• Near to the Wild Heart (1943): Her debut novel, already showcasing her lyrical and introspective style. Influenced by Joyce and Woolf.
• The Hour of the Star (1977): Her last novel and most internationally known. Tells the story of Macabéa but also questions the narrator’s role and the limitations of language.
• The Passion According to G.H. (1964): Philosophical and existential, often seen as her most radical work. A woman undergoes a spiritual breakdown after killing a cockroach.
• Family Ties (1960): Short stories that dissect family life with psychological and surreal precision.
• The Foreign Legion (1964): A mix of short stories and chronicles, blurring genres and identities.
• An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures (1969): A novel about love and the search for language to express emotion.

A writer of the future?

Clarice Lispector still feels modern — or more than that, she feels like she writes for the future. Her work doesn’t offer easy answers but invites the reader into the risk of thought. It’s literature that demands presence, silence, and listening. Perhaps that’s why, in noisy times, she is being rediscovered: amid excess, Clarice offers a space for breath and depth.

As she once wrote: “I am a question.” And that question continues to echo — louder than ever — among 21st-century readers.