Manuel Baptista da Silva

Poet. After completing primary education, he went to work in Porto as a shop assistant. At 13 years old, his godfather sent him to study at the Franciscan college of Santo António, in Tui (Spain), returning to Porto at 21 without completing the seminary course. At Colégio Nacional, in Porto, he served as prefect and professor of Portuguese and Latin. In 1934, he joined the School Inspectorate of Viseu, being transferred in 1937 to Viana do Castelo, where he settled. Here he met the poet Alfredo Reguengo, who would become his friend, colleague, and fellow prisoner due to both being accused of belonging to the intellectual sector of the Portuguese Communist Party. In 1946, he was arrested by the PIDE at his workplace, taken to the respective prisons in Porto, and dismissed from public service. Shortly after, having appealed, he was released from prison on parole. From then on, alternating periods of convictions and appeals, he was arrested again in 1948, at the PIDE's prison facilities in Porto, at Santa Cruz do Bispo prison in 1949, and from June 11, 1952, he eventually served his sentence at Peniche Fort, along with Alfredo Reguengo and Aurélio Barbosa (editor of the prestigious Viana do Castelo newspaper A Aurora do Lima from 1943, and its owner and administrator after 1979). Returning from prison and unemployed, he subsisted as an insurance agent and accountant. He contributed poems to various newspapers, most of them under the pseudonym Elmano Vilas (Manoel Silva) and more rarely Mabasil and Basil (Manuel Baptista da Silva and Baptista da Silva, respectively). In the newspaper A Aurora do Lima, besides contributing poetry, he also participated in the literary page «Lume Novo». After the April Revolution of 1974, he was reinstated in public service, returning to the School Inspectorate of Viana do Castelo, to retire in 1975 as a first official and accounts technician. He possesses many unpublished poems and published his first and, to date, only book of poetry, at 86 years old, titled 101 Poemas de Uma Vida (1996).