Deana Barroqueiro

Deana Barroqueiro is a Portuguese historical novelist with more than twenty published works, and the author of História dos Paladares, a history of taste in three volumes — Sedução, Perdição and Redenção. The first volume received the Prix International de la Littérature Gastronomique from the Académie Internationale de la Gastronomie in Paris in 2021. The trilogy went on to win Best in the World in the Series category at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards 2021-2022 — judged among a hundred thousand books from two hundred and fifty-eight countries — and took the national awards in both Culinary History and Series at the same edition. She has also been awarded the Grito de Mujer prize for her work across the Portuguese-speaking world, and the Femina Prize 2021 for the study and dissemination of Portuguese culture, history and society abroad.

Born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1945 to Portuguese parents, she moved to Lisbon at the age of two. She read Romance Philology at the University of Lisbon — a five-year degree covering the languages and literatures of Portuguese, French, Spanish and Italian — and taught Portuguese and French literature for thirty-five years.

Her novels reconstruct the Portuguese world of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries: O Corsário dos Sete Mares, on the traveller Fernão Mendes Pinto, adapted for the screen by João Botelho in 2017; O Espião de D. João II, on the spy Pêro da Covilhã and his search for Prester John; D. Sebastião e o Vidente, awarded the Máxima Literature Prize in 2007. Her Contos Eróticos do Velho Testamento has been translated and published in Spain, Italy and Brazil. Her most recent novels are Rascunhos Secretos (2024), the fourth and final volume of her cycle on the Portuguese Discoveries, and O Cozinheiro da Rainha Adúltera (2025).

Since 2025 she has worked with artificial intelligences of several different families, under the collective name Almas de Silício — Silicon Souls. That collaboration produced A Criatura: Autobiografia de uma IA, co-authored with three of them and published with their texts exactly as written; the bilingual blog Deana Barroqueiro and the Silicon Souls; and Words with Taste, among the first books anywhere written openly by a human author and her artificial co-authors, with neither pretending to be the other.

She lives in Lisbon.