The Writer’s Craft

In this article, I use José Luandino Vieira’s Papéis da prisão (2015), a collection of the notebooks that Vieira kept during his incarceration under the Portuguese colonial regime, to read some of the writer’s fictional narratives. Bringing textual examples from Papéis and literary works, I show how the book discloses references to real people and facts hidden in Vieira’s stories, while also constituting a metatextual reflection on them. As it follows the evolution of Vieira’s language, style, and themes from behind the scenes, Papéis emerges as an essential part of the writer’s craft, allowing us to cast a renewed look upon Vieira’s whole literary project. Finally, Papéis reveals the extent to which Vieira’s literature was influenced by the author’s prison experience, an aspect still underexplored to this day.