Miguel Torga

Miguel Torga, pseudonym of Adolfo Correia da Rocha (1907 – 1995), is considered one of the greatest Portuguese writers of the 20th century. He wrote poetry, short stories, theater and a 16 volume diary.

He was born in the village of São Martinho de Anta in the Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro region, to small-time farmer parents. After a short spell as student in a catholic seminary in Lamego, his father sent him to Brazil in 1920, where he worked on an uncle's coffee plantation. His uncle, finding him to be a clever student, decided to pay for his studies. Torga returned to Portugal i and in 1933 graduated in Medicine at the University of Coimbra. He practiced in his village of São Martinho de Anta and in other places around the country. By this time, he started writing and self-publishing his books for a number of years. In 1941, he established himself as an otolaryngologist physician in Coimbra.

He was a member of the literary movement Presença for a short period before founding two cultural magazines in the 1930s. After the publication of the book O Quarto Dia da Criação do Mundo he was arrested for two months, between December 1939 and February 1940.

His agnostic beliefs are reflected on his work, which deals mainly with the nobility of the human condition in a beautiful but ruthless world where God is either absent or nothing but a passive and silent, indifferent creator.

The recognition of his work earned him several important awards, as the Montaigne Prize, in 1981, and the first ever Prémio Camões in 1989. He was several times nominated for the Nobel Prize of Literature, from 1960 to 1994, and it was often believed that he would be the first Portuguese language writer to win.

Thank you, Pedro