Maria do Rosário Pedreira

“Like a sheet of snow gently

covering December gardens,

night rested a cold hand on

my blanket.”
_{- from: Heart}

Portuguese poet Maria do Rosário Pedreira (Lisbon 1959) studied literature and then taught high school for five years. In 1987 she began working at a publishing house and has continued to do so, currently at one of the largest Portuguese book companies, Leya: she is co-responsible for fiction there. In the 1990s, she wrote a series of children's books entitled Clube das Chaves, which had twenty-one volumes, some of which were filmed for television. The same happened with a second, slightly smaller series (seventeen volumes), Detective Maravilhas, which she wrote between 1997 and 2007. In 1993 she published the autobiographical novel Alguns homens, duas mulheres e eu ("Some men, two women and I"). She has also written a large number of song lyrics, including for fado singer Ana Moura. 

Although she began writing poems early on, she waited a long time to publish them, she writes in her preface to the edition of her collected work, Poesia reunida, from which a selection was made for Shards. First because she didn't think it was good or important enough, or simply didn't want to share it with readers yet; later, from the time she worked at a publishing house, because she feared that her fellow publishers would publish her not for the value of the poems but because it was she who had written them. Until the mid-1990s, when she was persuaded to submit poems for competition, the first prize being an publication in book form. She won that contest, and in 1996 her collection A Casa e o Cheiro dos Livros was published by the publishing house was Quetzal, where her two later collections - O Canto do Vento nos Ciprestes and Nenhum Nome Depois - and the collected work were also published, which, in addition to those three books, consists of her poems published separately in journals, collected for this occasion under the title A Ideia do Fim. 

They have particularly telling titles, those four collections. "The House and the Smell of Books," "The Song of the Wind in the Cypresses," "No Name After That," and "The Idea of the End". Together they almost form a program, which could be summarized with the words house, books, wind, names and end. Almost a metaphor for the life of a publisher. 

In 2022, she published a new collection titled O Meu Corpo Humano ("My Human Body" or "My Human Body"), with which she won the prestigious Casino da Póvoa prize the following year.