Herberto Hélder

Herberto Helder was born in the Portuguese Atlantic island of Madeira.^[2] In 1946 he traveled to Lisbon to complete his secondary studies and subsequently in 1948 moved to Coimbra to go into Law school. By 1949 he had transferred to the Humanities University to study Romance Philology but dropped out after three years without completing the course. After returning to Lisbon he took up several temporary jobs, getting in touch with a circle of artists and writers such as Mário Cesariny, Luiz Pacheco, João Vieira and Hélder Macedo. The group revolved around Surrealism, which would inform his early writings. In 1958, his first book, O Amor em Visita was published. Over the course of the following years, he traveled and lived in France, the Netherlands, and Belgium, taking menial jobs to survive.

In 1994, he was the winner of the Pessoa Prize, which he turned down, saying "Don't tell anyone and give the prize to someone else ..."^[3]

Herberto Helder's poetry and fiction is very visual, and has connections with Surrealism, still his style is difficult to define; he was a practitioner of experimental poetry and some call him an orphic or visionary poet (that somehow reminds Ezra Pound).

Considered one of the most important contemporary Portuguese poets his poetry is not yet enough studied by academics due to the obscurity of his personality itself (he refused to take literary prizes or have media exposure) and the complexity of his paradoxal work that has a strange enchantment.