Livraria Lello receives Filipe Melo and Juan Cavia
The authors of the best-seller Ballad for Sophie will be at the World's Most Beautiful Bookshop, on October 21st at 9:30 pm, for a conversation not to be missed, led by director Luís Araújo.
Filipe Melo is a musician, film director, and comic book author. From an early age, he revealed his passion for the piano, more specifically for jazz and improvisation. He studied at Hot Clube de Portugal and later at Berklee College of Music in Boston, and after many years as a pianist, he also became a composer and orchestrator. In the area of cinema, he was the creator of several projects such as I'll See You in My Dreams, Um Mundo Catita, and Sleepwalk.
In 2009, he made his debut as a writer with the publication of the comic book The Amazing Adventures of Dog Mendonça and Pizzaboy, and, since then, he has published several comics. In 2012 he was invited to write an anthology commemorating the 25th anniversary of Dark Horse Comics, alongside the great comic book writers Frank Miller and Mike Mignola.
The author has books published in several countries, such as France, Poland, Brazil, USA, among others. Many of these works are the result of collaboration with Juan Cavia, a well-known Argentine art director for film and advertising. In 2020, they published Ballad for Sophie, a graphic novel dedicated to Beatriz Lebre, a young pianist and university student of Psychology, killed by a university colleague.
National and international critics were not indifferent to the work, which has since won several awards. In 2021, it was awarded the Best Comic Strip by a Portuguese Author at the AmadoraBD festival and the Book of the Year prize from Livraria Bertrand. In 2022, it was nominated for four Eisner awards - highly regarded awards in the USA for graphic novels - at ComiCon in San Diego, in the categories of Best Comic Book Album, Best American Edition of a Foreign Book, Best Writer (Filipe Melo) and Best Illustrator / Multimedia Artist (Juan Cavia).
This session, conducted by the stage director Luís Araújo, is free entry, with prior registration through the Livraria Lello website. It will also be possible to watch the event via live streaming on the Facebook page or the Youtube channel of Livraria Lello.
