Olga Benario, German and Jewish, was one of the most remarkable Communist activists of the twentieth century. Blessed with a genius for organization and an unwavering devotion, the beautiful, willful daughter of a liberal Munich lawyer crisscrossed the globe educating and activating legions to combat the worldwide plagues of nazism and fascism. At the age of nineteen, she masterminded a daring prison raid to free her then-lover, the Communist intellectual Otto Braun. Together they escaped to Moscow, where they quickly rose in the ranks of the international Communist movement. At twenty-six, she was chosen to serve as bodyguard to the legendary Brazilian Communist guerrilla leader Luis Carlos Prestes, who has been brought to Moscow for training and will soon become her lover. Traveling under assumed names, they crossed Europe and North and South America to reach Brazil, where Prestes would launch a revolution against the Fascist regime. Within months, they were seized by police. After six months of tirelessly continuing her activism from within Brazilian prisons, Olga, now seven months pregnant, was classified as extremely dangerous and was deported to the Nazi Germany. She was subsequently sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp, and in February of 1942, she was sent to her death in the gas chambers at Bernburg. Reissued to coincide with a new film adaptation by the producers of "City of God," Olga is "a heartbreaking biography that] is filled with high drama" (Publishers Weekly).
" Olga's] hunger for adventure, her sheer force of character, her passion and courage, called her to a strange and tragic destiny. . . . The saga of Olga Benario is aflame with the telltale glow of an author who has fallen hopelessly in love with his subject. Morais tells Benario's story so vividly, so convincingly, that we can readily understand why." -Los Angeles Times Book Review
Fernando Morais is a journalist who also served as Minister of Culture for Sao Paulo province.

Adelia Prado was "discovered" she was nearly 40 by Brazil's foremost modern poet, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, who was astonished to read her 'phenomenal' poems, launching her literary career with his announcement that St Francis was dictating verses to a housewife in the provincial backwater of Minas Gerais. Psychiatrists in droves made the pilgrimage to Divinopolis to delve into the psyche of this devout Catholic who wrote startlingly pungent poems of and from the body; they were politely served coffee and sent back to the city. After publishing her first collection, Baggage, in 1976, she went on to become one of Brazil's best-loved poets, awarded the Griffin Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014. Adelia Prado's poetry combines passion and intelligence, wit and instinct. Her poems are about human concerns, especially those of women, about living in one's body and out of it, about the physical but also the spiritual and the imaginative life; about living in two worlds simultaneously: the spiritual and the material. She also writes about ordinary matters, insisting that the human experience is both mystical and carnal. For her these are not contradictory: 'It's the soul that's erotic,' she writes. 'Sometimes other poets and critics analyse my writing, and they've said how, even though the text is made of colloquial and everyday language, the work goes to transcendental issues. I don't know, I don't explain things; I simply do what I do. I only know how to write about concrete, immediate and commonplace things. But these commonplace things show me their metaphysical nature. I can only see the metaphysical, the divine, through the concrete and the human.'

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