Child of the Dark

"I chose the Carolina de Jesus in part because it’s a sentimental favourite. It was the first book I ever read in Portuguese, and there was a reason for that. It came out in 1960, but I read it a decade later, and it really marked the first time the voice of the Brazilian lower class, the oppressed, was heard. It gave Brazilian readers a glimpse into a world that was all around them but that they didn’t know or even think about. Carolina de Jesus lived in a favela, but she wrote simply and elegantly, so much so that people thought that it must have been polished by the journalist who found her, which wasn’t true. It has been enormously influential and started a whole style of testimonial literature in Latin America. There is a very direct line between this book and City of God , which became a hit film and was based on a memoir in a similar style, and even Rigoberta Menchú’s famous autobiography. In Portuguese the book is actually called ‘the junk closet’ or ‘the garbage room’, the place for people consigned to the margins of society, whose lives have no meaning or value. It was quite revolutionary."