Victoria - Victoria Schechter é uma escritora brasileira atualmente radicada no Reino Unido, com uma paixão por narrativas que atravessam fronteiras e idiomas.
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How might disability reshape literary form? What happens when we write from the body — with all its fragilities, dependencies, and discontinuities? In To Break the Fifth Wall, the provisional title of my creative-critical thesis (click here if you’d like to learn more about research structured in this way), I explore how disability can transform not only the stories we tell, but also the forms we choose to tell them. The project brings together fiction and theory to suggest that fragmentation, silence, and uncertainty are not narrative failures, but ways of giving form to the experience of being in the world differently.
Prismas is my debut novel, published by Editora Patuá in 2023 (only in Portuguese – for now). The narrative delves into themes such as perception, identity, and the lived experience of disability. While not autobiographical, the book reflects aspects of the conversations and exchanges I’ve had throughout my life with people who are blind or have low vision—and a bit of my own experience as well.
The story follows Isabel Leone, a blind singer and music teacher, who leads a stable and independent life in the city of São Paulo. Her routine is abruptly transformed when she discovers an unplanned pregnancy. During a long flight, Isabel delves into memories of her childhood and adolescence in the interior of São Paulo, in a family of coffee farmers in decline; she revisits the scars of loneliness imposed by the way her disability was perceived at home; and recalls her encounter with music, sexuality, desire, and the construction of her autonomy.
“Victoria Schechter’s literature is unique because her perspective is unique. Blindness has often been portrayed as a sensory matter, an alternative access to the world’s images. Here, based on the author’s experience and her remarkable ability to synthesise it, blindness becomes something more: it becomes a socially significant issue that powerfully and unexpectedly shapes every human relationship. It’s not just the world’s images that take on a new dimension — it’s
our very understanding of the world that transforms under the author’s clear-sighted gaze.”
“Victoria Schechter, herself visually impaired, offers in her debut novel a more realistic approach. The protagonist-narrator is Isabel Leone, a blind singer and music teacher whose routine is disrupted by an unwanted pregnancy.”
“A sensitive and beautifully written book in which the protagonist learns to overcome the solitude of visual impairment to find her own place in the world.”
Here I write reflections on life, share books and things worth watching and listening to, and, yes, a little about my experience as a disabled person, expatriate, PhD researcher, and creative — and about the threshold I seem to inhabit between all these identities. (For now, only in English on Substack.)
If you’d like to have a chat — whether to work with me, arrange a workshop or mentorship, collaborate on a project, learn more about my research (or just have a literary conversation for its own sake) — you can fill out the form next to this text and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Don’t forget to fill in the ‘email’ field! Without it, I won’t be able to reply.”
E-mail:Follow Victoria
