Teresa Fernandes-Swiatkiewicz

An English teacher and, by vocation, a translator of Polish literature into European Portuguese (including Tokarczuk, Szymborska, Herbert, Gombrowicz, Lem, Libera, Huelle, Szabłowski). She was a Portuguese language lecturer at the Faculty of Modern Languages (Neofilologia) of the University of Warsaw in the 1980s; holds an MA in Polish philology from the University of Warsaw and a PhD in translation studies from the University of Łódź. She was awarded the Gold Cross of Merit by the President of the Republic of Poland Bronisław Komorowski in 2012 for promoting Polish culture in Portugal, won the Grand Prize for Literary Translation in Portugal for Olga Tokarczuk’s Casa de Dia Casa de Noite in 2022, and received distinctions for her translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s Viagens in 2019 and for her translation Poesia Quase Toda by Zbigniew Herbert in 2025. She is a researcher at the Centro de Estudos Comparatistas at the University of Lisbon and the author of the literary biography of Wisława Szymborska, A Vida Não Está à Venda.