Letter to Pessoa

"Line by line, Cahill's writing is musical, assured: cumulatively, her seriousness is evident, her ambition impressive." – Hilary Mantel

Letter to Pessoa is the first collection of short stories by award-winning Goan-Australian poet Michelle Cahill. It is an imaginative tour de force, portraying the experiences of a whole range of characters, including a scientist, a cat, and a young Indian female version of Joseph Conrad. The settings span the globe, from Barcelona to Capetown, Boston to Chiang Mai, and Kathmandu to Krakow.

Like the poet Fernando Pessoa, who gives the collection its title and who created as many as seventy versions of himself, Cahill displays remarkable inventiveness. She brings distant landscapes and situations to life in compelling detail, expressing the fear, longing, obsession, and outrage of the people caught up in them.

Displaying an awareness of the power of writing to create realities, the collection also includes a number of fictions in letter form. These are addressed to Jacques Derrida, Virginia Woolf, Jean Genet, and Margaret Atwood, as well as JM Coetzee, from his character Melanie Isaacs.