A Vida da Poesia

Portuguese poet and essayist Gastão Cruz was born in 1941 in Faro, Algarve, and graduated in Germanic Philology from the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon. A secondary school teacher, he also worked as a lecturer in Portuguese at King's College London between 1980 and 1986 and, from the 1970s to the 1990s, after the death of Carlos Ferreira, directed the Teatro Hoje/Teatro da Graça theatre group, which he helped found. He translated several dramatic texts by authors such as Strindberg, Shakespeare, and Jean Cocteau. While still very young, at only 19 years old, Gastão Cruz, already showing a great attachment to poetry, published his first book. Percussive Death, in the collective volume entitled Poetry 61, which compiles texts from a group of five young poets: Casimiro de Brito, Fiama Hasse Pais Brandão, Luiza Neto Jorge, and Maria Teresa Horta. Author of a very diverse body of work, he has published, among others, the following titles: Percussive Death; Portuguese Poetry Today, 1973; Campanula, 1978; Light Organ; Trance (1960-1990); The Black Stones, 1995; Collected Poems, 1999; Craters, 2000, who received the D. Dinis Prize. He passed away on March 20, 2022.