Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida joins Brooklyn Book Festival

Portuguese author Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida will feature in the Virtual Festival Day at the 2026 Brooklyn Book Festival on September 20.

Portuguese writer Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida will participate in the Brooklyn Book Festival in the United States on September 20, organizers announced.

The author is the only Portuguese writer invited to this year’s edition of the New York event, according to information on the festival website. She appears on the lineup alongside American Pulitzer Prize winner Maggie Haberman and writer Chloe Benjamin, author of The Immortalists.

The Virtual Festival Day opens the 2026 edition of the Brooklyn Book Festival. The festival runs for nine days from September 20 to September 28, featuring literary events across New York City alongside an online component for international participants.

Event organizers have not yet released the detailed schedule for the Portuguese author. The exact time, session format, panel topics, and fellow participants for her session remain unannounced.

US publication of Three Stories of Forgetting

Her festival appearance coincides with her introduction to American readers through the English translation of her book Three Stories of Forgetting. The volume was published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in December 2025, translated from Portuguese by Alison Entrekin.

The book was originally published in Portugal by Relógio d’Água in 2021 under the title Três histórias de esquecimento. It collects three novellas titled A visão das plantas, Maremoto, and Bruma. The first two novellas also received standalone editions in Portugal.

All three narratives focus on characters marked by the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and the Portuguese empire. According to the US publisher, the book explores the experiences of men living with the consequences of imperial rule through interconnected stories of memory and forgetting.

The characters include Celestino, a former slave trader who returns to the isolation of his home and garden, and Boa Morte da Silva, an Angolan car parker who fought for the Portuguese military during the Colonial War before being left to his fate on the streets of Lisbon. A third character, Bruma, is an enslaved man connected to the nineteenth century Portuguese novelist Eça de Queirós.

Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida was born in Luanda, Angola, and grew up in Portugal. Angola is a former Portuguese colony in southern Africa that gained independence in 1975, while Portugal is a European nation on the Iberian Peninsula. Almeida has written numerous works spanning fiction and nonfiction essays.

Her published titles include Esse cabelo, Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso, Os gestos, As telefones, Ferry, and Toda a ferida é uma beleza. She also authored O que é ser uma escritora negra hoje, de acordo comigo and Livro da doença.

Almeida holds a doctorate from the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon. Over her career, she has won several major literary awards, including the Oceanos Prize, the APE Grand Prize for Novel and Novella, the Vergílio Ferreira Prize, and the FLUL Alumni Prize.

Between 2023 and 2024, Almeida served as a faculty member at New York University. She has also contributed writings to major international publications, including The New York Times, Granta, la Repubblica, Folha de S.Paulo, Serrote, and Quatro Cinco Um.

Established in 2006, the Brooklyn Book Festival is one of the premier literary festivals in New York City, hosting American and international authors each autumn. The annual gathering draws writers, publishers, and readers from around the world to Brooklyn, the most populous borough of New York City.

Following the online opening on September 20, the 2026 festival schedule includes a dedicated Children’s Day on September 26. The main Festival Day takes place on September 27, featuring hundreds of authors, panel discussions, readings, and a book market with more than 250 publishing houses.

Cultural partners will organize more than 70 associated events across all five boroughs of New York City, with the complete schedule expected during August. Organizers created the Virtual Festival Day to allow international writers and audiences to join the event without traveling to New York.…Read more by Lukas Ibrahim