Brazilian novelist Lygia Fagundes Telles, one of the most celebrated writers in the Portuguese language, died Sunday in Sao Paulo at age 98, the Brazilian Academy of Letters said.

Telles, who was elected a member of the academy in 1985, was a five-time winner of Brazil’s prestigious Jabuti prize, and was awarded the Camoes, the most important prize in Portuguese literature, in 2005.

“She was a grande dame of Brazilian literature, one of the nation’s best-loved writers,” wrote newspaper Estado de Sao Paulo.

“She had an elegant style and unique spirit that enabled her to write with serenity and strength, giving the reader the chance to reflect on the facets of existence.”

The child of a pianist and a lawyer, Telles earned a law degree at the University of Sao Paulo, but turned to writing at the urging of two friends who themselves became famous writers, Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Erico Verissimo.

She published her debut novel in her 30s, “Ciranda de Pedra” (“The Marble Dance,” 1954), and was soon creating a prolific body of novels, short stories, plays and screenplays.

The novel widely considered her greatest, “As Meninas” (“The Girls,” 1973), describes the lives of three young women in the early 1970s under Brazil’s brutal military dictatorship.

She confronted the dictatorship directly in 1976, traveling to Brasilia with a group of fellow writers to hand-deliver a manifesto to the regime denouncing its censorship.

Outspoken and deeply engaged in social causes and the arts, she proudly considered herself a “third-world writer,” and was “committed to chronicling the difficult human condition in a country with such fragile education and health,” the Brazilian Academy said on its website.

Just the third woman elected to the academy, she was also an early advocate for women’s rights, once saying, “I was a feminist in the days when no one even knew what feminism was.”

Married to the late film critic Paulo Emilio Sales Gomes, she had a son from a previous marriage, the filmmaker Goffredo da Silva Telles Neto, two granddaughters and a great-granddaughter.