Alexandre Castanheira

Essayist, playwright, and poet. Holding degrees in Historical-Philosophical Sciences from the Faculty of Letters of Lisbon and in Modern French Literature from the University of Paris VIII, he is a professor at the Escola Superior de Educação Jean Piaget in Almada. Involved from an early age in Almada's civic association movement, he has served as a leader in several community associations and is an advisor to the Federação Portuguesa das Colectividades de Cultura e Recreio. An opponent of the Salazar regime from his youth, he was a member of the Central Committee of the MUD Juvenil from 1947 to 1954 (the year he went underground), and of the Central Committee of the Portuguese Communist Party from 1955 to 1969. In France, where he lived in exile, he was secretary of the French Movement Against Racism. In the 1940s and 1950s, he published poems in newspapers and magazines under the name Edgard Castanheira. He was an editor of the underground newspaper Avante! and a contributor to Diário de Lisboa. Romeu Correia considered his work Chico do Norte «a beautiful and courageous theatrical text created in defense of Agrarian Reform; a didactic play, very precise in its objectives.» Regarding his poetry, João Rui de Sousa notes «the dramatically ironic movement of lives too accustomed to or too bound by the clock of a violent daily routine, made of the death of repetitive signs, of arid routine.» He organised and selected the poetry anthology Poesia em Cooperação (1988) and participated in the anthologies A Diáspora em Letra Viva (1985), Água Clara: Poetas em Vila Viçosa (1987), edited by António Rebordão Navarro and Orlando Neves, Águas de Lisboa (1989), 35 Textos para Paulo Cid (1992), O Tejo e a Margem Sul na Poesia Portuguesa (1993), and Antologia dos Serões da Beira. He wrote prefaces for A Batalha do Uruguai by Henrique Pastorino (1981), A Liberdade Tem Nome-Luísa by João Fernando (1983), Almada: Toponímia das Freguesias Urbanas by Pereira de Sousa (1985), and Memórias Itinerantes by Jaime Lopes (1996). He authored the text for Nelson Figueira's photography book, Águas de Lisboa (1989). He was awarded the Gold Medal of Cultural Merit of the City of Almada and the Gold Medal of Merit and Dedication of the Federação Portuguesa de Colectividades.