Leonel Cosme

Poet, fiction writer, and essayist. In 1950, he moved to Angola with his family, settling in that then-Portuguese colony, where he worked as a civil servant and practiced journalism. He returned to Portugal in 1975. In 1982, he went back to Angola with the aim of helping a country that aspired to be a new nation, and he remained there in that spirit until 1987. In Angola, he had a great influence on cultural life, both by collaborating with the magazine Cultura, from Luanda (1957-1961), and the influential Boletim Cultural de Huambo, published in the then-city of Nova Lisboa (1948-1974), and by being one of the founders and director of Edições Imbondeiro, from Sá da Bandeira (today Lubango), and also by prefacing and publishing there, in partnership with Garibaldino de Andrade, what were – due to their content and the historical moment of their publication – the most important anthologies of new Angolan literature: Contos d' África (1961), Novos Contos d' África (1962), and Antologia Poética Angolana (1963). Also noteworthy in his work is the trilogy A Revolta (1963-1992), novels that reflect the author's privileged position, having settled in Angola since his youth, as an observer of a process that goes from «revolt» to the «final hour», passing through the «promised land». Leonel Cosme is also the author of the catalog for the Primeira Exposição de Bibliografia Angolana (Sá da Bandeira, today Lubango, 1962), with about 700 titles distributed across six areas: História e Sociologia, Etnografia, Literatura e Ficção, Viagens e Narrativas, Vários Estudos, Antropologia. In addition to the already cited anthology, Contos d'África, he is represented in Angola, by Luís Forjaz Trigueiros (1962).