Fernando Pessoa

Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa (Portuguese:*[fɨɾˈnɐ̃dw pɨˈsoɐ]; June 13, 1888 – November 30, 1935), commonly known as Fernando Pessoa, was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher, described as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language. He also wrote in and translated from English and French.

Pessoa was a prolific writer, and not only under his own name, for he dreamed up approximately seventy-five others. He did not call them pseudonyms because he felt that did not capture their true independent intellectual life and instead called them heteronyms. These imaginary figures sometimes held unpopular or extreme views.

Early years in Durban


Pessoa's birthplace: a large flat at São Carlos Square, just in front of Lisbon's opera.
Pessoa was born in Lisbon. On July 13, 1893, when Pessoa was five, his father, Joaquim de Seabra Pessoa, died of tuberculosis and the following year, on January 2, his younger brother Jorge, aged one, also died.

After the second marriage of his mother, Maria Magdalena Pinheiro Nogueira, to João Miguel dos Santos Rosa, on December 31, 1895, little Fernando sailed with his mother for South Africa in the beginning of 1896, to join his stepfather, a military officer appointed Portuguese consul in Durban, capital of the former British Colony of Natal.

Fernando Pessoa
Regarded as one of the greatest poets of the 20th Century, the unique Fernando Pessoa and his several heteronyms, each endowed with a different personality, biography and writing style, is beyond comparison. Pessoa’s poetry changes radically according to “who” was writing, making each alternate self as distinctive as the real life poet himself. Acclaimed and revered as one of Portugal’s finest writers, the leading figure in Modernism only published one book of poetry during his lifetime, “Mensagem”, with all his other writings being only discovered and published after he died at the age of 47 in 1935.

The Book

The Book of Disquiet is the fourth most sold book originally written in Portuguese on Amazon.com. Penned by one of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms, Bernardo Soares, it was written in fragments, part narrative, part journal and part prose, and yet it captivates the reader in a way no other book can.