After a brief trip to Europe, Hilst was influenced by Nikos Kazantzakis' Report to Greco to move away from the São Paulo scene, and she secluded herself in an estate near the outskirts of Campinas.
Deciding to devote her life to her literary creations, she constructed the House of the Sun (Casa do Sol), where she would invite several artists and intellectuals to live.
Hilst attended elementary and high school at Collegia Santa Marcelina in São Paulo before enrolling in a bachelor's degree program at Mackenzie Presbyterian University.
[5] After graduating from Mackenzie, Hilst began studying for her second degree at the law school at the University of São Paulo,[2] where she met her lifelong friend Lygia Fagundes.
[6] Hilst published her first book of poetry in 1950, Omen (Presságio), which received great acclaim from her contemporaries like Jorge de Lima and Cecília Meireles.
[7][8] Upon her return to São Paulo, she settled in the Sumaré neighborhood, and was frequently in the company of other artists, such as Gilka Machado and Bráulio Pedroso.
[2][9] However, after reading Nikos Kazantzakis' Report to Greco, and being influenced by its themes of self-isolation to achieve knowledge of the human being, Hilst decided to leave São Paulo in 1964 and return to her childhood home in Campinas.
[15] In the 1980s, due to increasing financial pressure from a lack of book sales, Hilst participated in the Programa do Artista Residente (Artist-in-Residence program), at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas, being the first artist to do so.
[23] Her health sharply declined after contracting an infection, aggravated by a chronic heart and pulmonary condition, before she eventually passed away due to multiple organ failure.
Textos grotescos) (1990); Cartas de um Sedutor (1991); and Bufólicas (1992), includes overtly pornographic material, if not pornography per se.
[33] In Hilst's prose fiction, she employs several narrative features to build the narrative, including passages of metanarrative discourse; soliloquies; simulacra of dramatic theatrical texts; colloquial register of regional linguistic variants; words, expressions and quotations from foreign literary works in the language of origin – in English and Latin; stream of consciousness and fractured reality; sparse notes; poems; letters and questions addressed directly to the reader.
[37][38] In 1962 she won the Prêmio PEN Clube of São Paulo, for Sete Cantos do Poeta para o Anjo (Massao Ohno Editor, 1962).
The Brazilian Association of Art Critics (APCA Prize) deemed Ficções (Edições Quíron, 1977) the best book of the year.
Rútilo Nada, published in 1993, took the Jabuti Prize for best short story, and finally, on 9 August 2002, she was awarded at the 47th edition of Prêmio Moinho Santista in the poetry category.
In March 1997, her works Com meus olhos de cão and A obscena senhora D were published by Éditions Gallimard, translated by Maryvonne Lapouge.
The latter was translated into English as The Obscene Madame D collaboratively by Nathanaël and Rachel Gontijo Araújo, and published jointly by Nightboat Books in New York and A Bolha Editora in Rio de Janeiro in 2012.
In 2014, Letters from a Seducer, John Keene's translation of the 1991 novel Cartas de um sedutor, was published by Nightboat Books and A Bolha Editora, and With My Dog Eyes, Adam Morris's translation of Hilst's 1986 novella Com os meus olhos de cão, was published by Melville House.