Fernando Pessoa

Pessoa was born in Lisbon and lost his father to tuberculosis at five; his mother remarried the Portuguese consul in Durban, and he grew up schooled in English on South Africa's coast before returning to Lisbon at seventeen. He never left the city again, earning his keep as a commercial translator of business correspondence while writing, by night, poetry under an accumulating cast of invented authors he called heteronyms: the pastoral Alberto Caeiro, the classicist Ricardo Reis, the futurist engineer Álvaro de Campos, each with a distinct biography and style.

He co-founded the modernist journal Orpheu in 1915 and published almost nothing else in his lifetime beyond one slim book of patriotic verse, Message (1934). A heavy drinker, he died in a Lisbon hospital in 1935 of cirrhosis, leaving behind a trunk stuffed with some twenty-five thousand unpublished manuscript pages, among them the notes for The Book of Disquiet, sorted and published only decades later.