Mário Furtado

Poet and fiction writer, Mário Furtado, pseudonym of Hélio Nunes Vieira, is also the author of a monograph on Xabregas, an old suburban area then predominantly industrial, where he was born and spent his childhood and adolescence. He completed primary education at Centro Escolar Republicano Elias Garcia and attended Liceu de Gil Vicente, but was forced, due to lack of resources, to abandon his studies at the age of thirteen, working as a messenger in a dental supply company and then in a textile company, first as a shop assistant and then as an office clerk. At the same time, he completed the Curso Geral do Comércio. In 1961, he was mobilized to Luanda. Between 1963 and 1971, he was employed by a shipping agency and then worked as a commercial agent in the bookselling sector. Primarily a writer of urban settings, Mário Furtado preferentially creates characters from poor classes and also from Lisbon's small and middle bourgeoisie, structuring his fictions around his own experience of observing the world, with its more or less dramatic social confrontations and testimonies of certain episodes of the contradictions and scandals of the fascist social and moral order. The cult of women, in turn, is the subject of many of his poems.