Press Release: Brazilian essayist in England publishes her first book

Joaquina Pires-O’Brien, Editor of PortVitoria, jopiresobrien@gmail.com

Joaquina Pires-O’Brien, a Brazilian translator, interpreter, essayist and former research botanist living in England, has published her first book of essays at Kindle Direct on 7 November 2016, in her native Portuguese – O homem razoável e outros ensaios (The reasonable man and other essays). The title of the book was taken from the first essay, which deals with the concept of ‘the reasonable man’ in the law of England and Wales, something she learned while working as a court interpreter in Suffolk and Norfolk.

There are 23 essays in total, covering a variety of topics which are relevant to contemporary issues worldwide. Some essays talk about individuals who captured the spirit of their time and whose work has many useful lessons to today’s problems, such as Friedrich Hayek, Elias Canetti, Stefan Zweig and George Orwell; others explain some thorny contemporary issues, such as post-modernism and its contempt for high culture and science; others still, cover the combined theme of religious faith, and the unintended consequences of religion such as terrorism. Edifying or not, the themes covered are linked to contemporary social problems that need to be discussed in the public sphere.

Pires-O’Brien studied Biology at Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo, Vitória, Brazil, and Botany at Central Washington State College, now CWU, Ellensburg, from where she received her BA in 1978. She also studied at Oregon State University, Corvallis, where she got her MSc (1980), and at the University of London, where she got her PhD (1991). In her view, it was her liberal arts education, as an undergraduate, that gave her the leverage to switch careers. Between 1999 and 2008, she published a number of essays and book reviews in Contemporary Review, Oxford, and after 2010, in the digital magazine PortVitoria – www.portvitoria.com, dedicated to speakers of Portuguese and Spanish around the world, which she founded in 2010.

Pires-O’Brien’s book O homem razoável e outros ensaios was published, in Kindle format, on 7 November 2016, together with its Spanish translation by Ricardo Pérez Banega – El hombre razonable y otros ensaios. Available at your Kinddle Store at Amazon.