Reis Brasil

Writer and professor. Born José Gomes Braz, he completed his primary education in his hometown, entering the Colégio dos Padres do Imaculado Coração de Maria in Spain at the age of eleven. He continued his studies there, earning a doctorate in Philosophy and Theology from the Catholic University of Tarragona, and later completing a degree in Philosophy at the Central University in Madrid. Returning to Portugal during the Spanish Civil War, he taught at Colégio Monteiro in Moncorvo and at the Seminary of Évora. He enrolled at the Faculty of Letters of Lisbon, completing his degree in Classical Philology, after which he was appointed a secondary school teacher, first in Lisbon, and later a Portuguese lecturer at the Faculty of Letters of Toulouse (France). Back in Portugal, it was in Santarém (1959), a city where he would remain for about twenty years, that he deepened his studies on Camões and Gil Vicente, also beginning an intense activity as a poet, novelist, and literary critic. An interpreter of Camões, he compiled his vision of this Portuguese author in the work Os Lusíadas: Comentários e Estudos Críticos, which has had successive editions since 1960. Again in Lisbon, he taught in various secondary schools. A regular contributor to numerous newspapers and magazines, he is a member of the Sociedade de Língua Portuguesa, the Associação de Jornalistas e Homens de Letras do Porto, the Associação Judaica Internacional, and the Academy of Study on Advancement of Humanities.