Lygia Fagundes Telles, "one of Brazil's most popular writers, whose stories of women trapped in unsatisfying relationships could also be read as allegories of her country's political situation," died April 3 at age 98, the New York Times reported. Her best known novel, The Girl in the Photograph (1973), "tells the story of three starkly different young women during the regime's most repressive years and includes graphic descriptions of officially-sanctioned torture, a subject that seemed certain to get the work banned by military censors. But in a twist of fate, the censor apparently found the book so boring that he gave up reading before he got to that part," the Times wrote.
Telles self-published her first book of short stories, Cellar and Townhouse, in 1938 at age 15. Her second collection, Living Beach, found a publisher in 1944, a year before she earned her law degree. For several years, Telles wrote a weekly column in A Manhã, a Rio newspaper, before publishing The Marble Dance (1954). Her other books include Before the Green Ball (1970), The Discipline of Love (1980) and The Garden Gnome (1995). In 1985, she became the third woman elected to a seat in the Brazilian Academy of Letters. She won the Camões Prize, sponsored by the governments of Portugal and Brazil, in 2005 and was nominated for a Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016 by the Brazilian Writers' Union.