"The Foreigner" | Frederico Pedreira

"The Foreigner" – The 2025 Program of Concerts, Conferences, Exhibitions, and Performances at the School of Arts of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa and the Research Centre in Science and Technology of the Arts (CITAR), is organizing the conference "Desconhecidos", with Frederico Pedreira, on March 6th at 18:30.

This program seeks to discuss the issue of the Foreigner, curated by Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, Daniel Ribas, José Alberto Gomes, and Nuno Crespo.

Synopsis:

A political exile wanders through a foreign city. He spots a kind and attentive police officer who seems nothing like the officers from his home country. Apparently. A small village somewhere in the interior of Portugal prepares for the imminent arrival of numerous war refugees. A writer prepares a book whose title may only be a promise of good intentions: Caros Desconhecidos (Dear Strangers). To what extent can hospitality sound like hostility?

Frederico Pedreira is a poet, novelist, essayist, and translator. His book Uma Aproximação à Estranheza (An Approach to Strangeness), based on his doctoral thesis, received the Prémio Imprensa Nacional/Vasco Graça Moura for Essay in Humanities. His novel A Lição do Sonâmbulo (The Lesson of the Sleepwalker) won the European Union Prize for Literature (2021) and the Fundação Eça de Queiroz Literary Prize, and has been published in Bulgaria, Croatia, Serbia, Hungary, and Macedonia. He published Coração Lento (Slow Heart), a poetry book awarded the SPA Authors Prize (2022), the novel Sonata para Surdos (Sonata for the Deaf) (2024), and À Solta no Exército de Salvação (Released in the Salvation Army) (2025). He has translated, among others, poetry books by W. B. Yeats, Dylan Thomas, and Louise Glück, essays by G. K. Chesterton and George Orwell, short stories by Katherine Mansfield, and numerous short stories and novels by authors such as Dickens, Swift, Wells, Hardy, Melville, Woolf, and Banville.