Nélida Cuiñas Piñon was born in May 3, 1934 in the middle class Vila Isabel area of Rio de Janeiro to Olivia Carmen Cuíñas Piñón, a homemaker and Lino Piñón Muíños, a merchant. Her mother was the child of Galician immigrants, her father a first generation Galician immigrant.
She studied at Santo Amaro School as a kid (which had its library renamed after her in 2011), a catholic school runned by nuns, and then she studied at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, PUC-Rio) before working as a journalist for the newspaper O Globo and the magazine Cadernos Brasileiros. She stated that this religious background was decisive in her human formation and also to her literary work and understanding of the human condition. She has taught writing in workshops and institutions including Columbia University, Johns Hopkins and the University of Miami, where she had been the Stanford Professor of Humanities.
