Über den Autor Pessoa, Fernando
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) was born in Lisbon and brought up in Durban, South Africa. He returned to Lisbon in 1905. A prolific writer, ascribing his work to a variety of personas or heteronyms, Pessoa published little in his lifetime and supported himself by working as a commercial translator. Although acknowledged as an intellectual and a poet, his literary genius went largely unrecognized until after his death. Richard Zenith (editor, translator, introducer) lives in Lisbon, where he works as a freelance writer, translator, and critic. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Pessoa: A Biography. His translations include Galician-Portuguese troubadour poetry; novels by Antonio Lobo Antunes; Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet, which won the Calouste Gulbenkian Translation Prize for Portuguese Translation; Fernando Pessoa and Co.: Selected Poems, which won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation; and João Cabral de Melo Neto's Education by Stone: Selected Poems, which won the Academy of American Poets’ Harold Morton Landon Translation Award. In 2012, Zenith was awarded Portugal’s Pessoa Prize.