Hilda de Almeida Prado Hilst, more widely known as Hilda Hilst (1930–2004) was a Brazilian poet, playwright and novelist, whose fiction and poetry were generally based upon delicate intimacy and often insanity and supernatural events. Particularly her late works belong to the tradition of magic realism.
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Hilst was born on April 21, 1930, in Jaú, Brazil. In 1948 she enrolled in the Law Course at Faculdade de Direito da Universidade de São Paulo (Largo São Francisco), finishing it in 1952. There she met her best friend, the writer Lygia Fagundes Telles. In 1966, Hilda moved to Casa do Sol (Sunhouse), a country seat next to Campinas, where she hosted a lot of writers and artists for several years. Living there, she dedicated all her time to literary creation.
She died on February 4, 2004 in Campinas.
Hilda Hilst wrote for almost 50 years, and collected the most important Brazilian literary prizes. In 1962 she won the Prêmio PEN Clube of São Paulo, for Sete Cantos do Poeta para o Anjo (Massao Ohno Editor, 1962). In 1969, the play O Verdugo took the Prêmio Anchieta, one of the most important in the country at the time. The Associação Brasileira de Críticos de Arte (APCA Prize) deemed Ficções (Edições Quíron, 1977) the best book of the year. In 1981, Hilda Hilst got the Grande Prêmio da Crítica para o Conjunto da Obra, by the same Associação Brasileira de Críticos de Arte. In 1984, the Câmara Brasileira do Livro gives her the Jabuti Prize to Cantares de Perda e Predileção, and, in the next year, the same book claimed the [[Prêmio Cassiano Ricardo (Clube de Poesia de São Paulo). Rútilo Nada, published in 1993, took the Jabuti Prize for best short story, and finally, on August 9, 2002, she was awarded at the 47th edition of Prêmio Moinho Santista in the poetry category.
From 1982 the writer joined the Programa do Artista Residente, of Universidade Estadual de Campinas - UNICAMP.
In several of her writings the author tackled polemic issues, as lesbianism and homosexuality.
Since 1995 her personal files are in IEL-UNICAMP and are available to researchers worldwide.
Some of her texts were translated from Portuguese to French, English, Italian and German. In March 1997, her works Com meus olhos de cão and A obscena senhora D were published by Editora Gallimard, Maryvonne Lapouge translation.