Maria da Conceição Nobre

Poet, fiction writer, and author of Spiritist works, the latter signed Maria da Conceição Nobre (Basílio Príncipe Moreira). She completed her studies in Portugal, after which she went to Angola, where she taught secondary education in Luanda and Lobito. In that former colony, where she lived until 1973, she carried out extensive cultural and literary activity, notably through the Núcleo de Estudos Anglo-Brasileiros, of which she was president by appointment of the then Rector of the University of Bahia (Brazil). Her ties to Brazilian cultural circles can be gauged by the activities of that center in Angola, notably the organization in Lobito of the Exposição de Poesia Brasileira, featuring 280 represented poets (1966), but also by the fact that M. Conceição Nobre was an active member of the following cultural organizations in that country: Academia de Letras Fronteira do Sueste, Academia de Letras Humberto de Campos, Associação Uruguaianense de Escritores e Editores, Clube de Poesia Uruguaiana, Academia Internacional de Letras Três Fronteiras, Academia de Trovadores da Fronteira Sudoeste do Rio Grande do Sul, Academia Literária Feminina de Porto Alegre, Academia Literária Feminina do Rio Grande do Sul, Academia Internacional de Ciências Humanísticas, and Clube de Poesia de Curitiba. Her literary activity in Angola, beyond the poetry she published in newspapers and magazines of the then-colony, was marked by the publication of the first major anthology of contemporary Angolan poetry—Antologia de Poesias Angolanas (1956)—where, for the first time in a volume of about 350 pages, six dozen poets born in Angola or living there were gathered together, many of whom would establish themselves as leading figures in the country's literature. In the 1960s, she founded the Grupo Fraterno Dr. Fernando Touré with some friends in Lobito (Angola), beginning her devotion to Spiritism. These activities are the subject of the books she edited following the establishment in the 1970s, in Barcelos and Braga, of the Associação Fraterna Dr. Fernando Touré (AFFETO), an association that she leads there alongside some of her former companions from Angola. Similarly, she inspired the creation of other Spiritist Centers in Portugal. After returning to Portugal, she began signing her books with her full legal name, but placing in parentheses the surnames she had not previously used. Still in Angola, she had signed some fiction works under the pseudonym Orly Bouquevillard, adding her own name as that of the «translator». She also used the pseudonym Margarida de Argil.