When Elga Fontes began studying the catalogues of Portuguese publishers during her master's degree, she noticed a striking imbalance: among hundreds of titles released over three years, only about 10% were by non-white authors. That observation, later confirmed across other publishing groups and in the new releases she followed as a content creator, planted a seed that has now grown into Kiala, a new imprint dedicated exclusively to Black authors.
Kiala, which officially entered the Portuguese market in May, is an imprint of the Lisbon-based publisher Vírgula d’Interrogação. The name comes from Kimbundu, one of Angola's Bantu languages, and means “to illuminate” or “bring light” – a fitting title for a project that aims to shine a spotlight on voices that have long remained in the shadows.
Fontes, who works as an editor at Vírgula d’Interrogação, first pitched the idea to publishing director Diana Almeida about two years ago. After receiving the green light, the team spent roughly two years building the brand before launching. The imprint's mission is straightforward: to create space in the Portuguese publishing market for books by Black authors, while pushing back against the idea that such literature must necessarily revolve around racism, discrimination, or suffering.
Breaking out of the stereotype
One of Kiala's guiding principles is to challenge the automatic association between Black authorship and narratives of pain. “With Kiala we also wanted to unsettle the notion that a Black person can only write about racism and suffering,” Fontes told European Pulse. She argues that this narrow framing is reductive, as Black people's lives are diverse, even if some are marked by common problems such as racism.
The imprint also seeks to address how works are evaluated. “We tend to see the creations of Black people as an exception, not as universal,” Fontes says. A white author can write about virtually any topic and have the quality of their work acknowledged regardless of the subject; for Black authors, she believes, that principle does not always hold.
That is why Kiala is not only looking for books centred on racial issues. Its first title, Feminismo na Periferia by US writer and cultural critic Mikki Kendall, is a non-fiction work that challenges a feminism presented as universal and addresses themes such as ethnicity, class, poverty, and violence. The second, scheduled for November, is The Death of Vivek Oji by Nigerian author Akwaeke Emezi, a celebrated novel originally published in English in 2020 that explores identity, discovery, and family, rooted in aspects of Nigerian society.
When selecting titles, the team asks what conversation a book might spark or continue in Portugal, and what readers may find in it. “A good book is a book that never stops saying what it has to say. That is our guiding star when choosing our books. A book that has a lot to say,” Fontes sums up.
An imprint of affirmative action
Kiala explicitly uses race as a criterion to tackle an inequality that Fontes sees as very real, but she insists it is not a sufficient condition for publication. “Our racial criterion is purely instrumental,” she explains. “It is not a statement that Black authors form a homogeneous literary category that has to be confined to a single space.”
Asked whether the imprint might end up pushing Black authors to the margins of the wider market, Fontes rejects that interpretation. “Kiala is present across the publishing market, as far as we can manage. We do not have just a Kiala bookshop, we do not have just a little corner where Black authors can be. Our aim and our work is precisely to bring in the voices of Black authors where they are not yet present, where they are scarcely represented, because Kiala is an imprint of 'affirmative action' created to correct a very real under-representation in the publishing market,” she argues.
For that reason, Kiala wants to be part of the traditional book market, rather than setting up a parallel circuit just for Black authors. The aim is “to normalise the idea of walking into a Portuguese bookshop and finding Black authors from different countries, in different genres and with different perspectives, without that being seen as something exceptional.”
Fontes acknowledges that the Portuguese market is small and fragile, with publishers chasing commercial potential and social media amplifying books that already attract attention. She also notes that some readers are less open to works that stray from what is seen as the norm. But she is careful not to point fingers. “There is no culprit. And Kiala is not intended as a criticism, it is meant as encouragement,” she says.
The imprint has already lined up two books for 2026 and has its 2027 list agreed, a sign that the project is gaining traction. As Kiala grows, it hopes to contribute to a broader shift in European publishing, where the voices of Black authors are no longer an exception but a natural part of the literary landscape.
