Trenton Daniel is a staff writer for The Miami Herald. He asked this of Benjamin Moser, author of ``Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector'' (Oxford University Press, $29.95):

Q: (Born to Jewish parents in Ukraine, Clarice Lispector was raised in Brazil and went on to write avante-garde novels and short stories that brought her fame in Latin America but scant recognition in the United States.) How did you come across Lispector in your readings, and why should she matter to English-speaking readers? And given the Swedish Academy's seeming interest in awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature to relatively little-known writers, do you think Lispector would have received the prize had she lived longer?

A: I came across Clarice Lispector in Portuguese class in college. I happened upon the language without knowing a single thing about it. And of all the things it led me to discover, the most unforgettable was Clarice Lispector, the mysterious, glamorous, tormented genius of Brazilian literature, who fascinated me from the first page of The Hour of the Star, a little book she wrote as she was dying and that I never managed to put out of my head. I fell in love with her. And I thought it was a terrible injustice that she was not better known in the English-speaking world, but for a long time I wasn't sure what, if anything, I could do about it.

A few years ago, I decided that the only way to tell the story was to write a biography to try to explain just how important she was, not only to the literature of Brazil or to Jewish literature but to the whole of the 20th century: It's the ultimate 20th century life, from Ukraine to Latin America to the United States to Europe, from art and war and sex and literature and Judaism and mysticism and Catholicism to the eternal questions of creation and money and love and death and God, she seemed to touch every theme that shaped our time, and described it all in a prose that I had never before encountered.

Would she have won the Nobel Prize? Well, if it was up to me, of course, since I think she deserves every accolade she has received. Even after five years of working on this book, I never got tired of her, as sometimes happens to biographers: The more time I spent with her, the greater became my respect and admiration and love for her.

• Moser and Martin speak on Sunday, 3 p.m., in 7128.