CARLOS PINTO SANTOS Translated
by John D. Godinho
Carlos
is born in Lisbon on February 2, 1944. In
the 1960s, student associations are subjected to such strict disciplinary
procedures that he is forced to abandon his studies in the field of economics
and enter the military service. He
goes awol on the eve of his departure to Mozambique.
The secret state police (PIDE) is now after him. He
arrives in Belgium in June 1967 and obtains a political refugee certificate from
the United Nations. As
a student of Political Science at the Free University of Brussels, he takes part
in the occupation of the university campus in May 1968.
The occupation drags on for several weeks but has no effect on other
sectors of of Belgian life. As so
many other Belgian students, he goes through his apprenticeship at the permanent
feast that is the Parisian “left bank.”
Finding Brussels a bore, he moves to Paris in 1969 and spends the next
three years researching the life and works of writers in the Portuguese and
Spanish languages for a German encyclopedia. The
encyclopedia is completed in 1972 and he returns to Belgium because the French
authorities refuse to grant him a residence and work permit. In
the middle of the night, between April 24 and 25, 1974, he is busy arranging
books on the shelves of the new bookstore “L’Oeil Sauvage,” which will
open in a few days in downtown Brussels. The
first news about the Portuguese Revolution lead him to abandon the books and
return to Portugal on April 30. Of
his own volition, he returns to the military service to collaborate with the MFA
(Movement of the Armed Forces), whose objective is to reorganize de armed
forces. He remained with the MFA
until November 25, 1975. Carlos
Pinto Santos has been a professional journalist since 1976. He
writes for the newspaper Página Um (Page
One) and for the magazines Cadernos do
Terceiro Mundo (Third World Notebooks) and Europeu.
He becomes permanent correspondent for the Macau and Ecologia
e Desenvolvimento (Ecology and Development) magazines.
Occasionally, he writes for Expresso
and Público. With
Orlando Neves he co-authored: Diário de uma Revolução (Diary of a Revolution);
De Longe à China-Macau na Historiografia e na Literatura Portuguesas (From
Far Away to China-Macau Through Portuguese Historiography and Literature);
a five-volume anthology published by the Cultural Institute of Macau; Antologia
Poética de Lisboa (A Poetic Anthology of Lisbon) and Dicionário
Obsceno da Língua Portuguesa (Dictionary of Obscenities of the Portuguese
Language) (2nd edition). The
two authors are now preparing the Dicionário Biográfico Ilustrado de Macau (The Illustrated Biographical
Dictionary of Macau). He
wrote the biographies of Amílcar Cabral, Abraham Lincoln and George Washington
for Oitenta Vidas que a morte não apaga (Eighty Lives Not Snuffed Out by
Death). At present, he is
preparing a series of other biographies of prominent figures in the
Portuguese-speaking world: Gungunhana,
Rei Amador, Rainha Ginga, Samora Machel, Agostinho Neto, Mário Pinto de
Andrade, etc. In 1993, he received the Macau Prize for Journalism, awarded by the Journalists Club, for his piece Danilo Barreiros, a Vida numa Rajada de Vento (Danilo Barreiros, Life in a Gust of Wind), published in Revista Macau. He
is the author of the following biographies on this site: |