Urbino de Sampaio

Poet, fiction writer, chronicler, and playwright. Urbino de San-Payo, literary name of Urbino Manuel Sampaio Ferreira, was a Philosophy student at the Seminaries of the Patriarchate of Lisbon between 1946 and 1952, later earning a doctorate in Metaphysical Sciences in the USA. He was an employee of CTT (Portuguese Post Office), Caixa Geral de Depósitos (a bank), and Siderurgia Nacional (National Steelworks). He co-founded the weekly O Concelho de Loures, which was shut down by the political police after the publication of its fifth issue. He directed, with the collaboration of painter Jorge Norvick, the collection of illustrated poetry postcards «Escopro» and wrote children's theater for Television. He associated with Bernardo Santareno, Romeu Correia, Manuel Lopes, Edmundo Bettencourt, Herberto Helder, and Luís Pacheco, among others. In 1968, for political reasons, he exiled himself to England, where he lived until 1970. In that year, he emigrated to the United States of America, settling in the Los Angeles area. Here, he has collaborated assiduously with Portuguese-language press, as well as with other national and foreign publications. A leader of several associations of the Portuguese community residing in the USA, he founded the Portuguese-Brazilian Cultural and Social Club of America in 1979. The experience of emigration, with the exception of the chronicles collected in Plural Transitivo and the essay Os Portugueses na Califórnia, is not truly reflected in Urbino de San-Payo's work, which, in fidelity to his roots, rather presents us with the world «left behind», as noted by Eduardo Mayone Dias. He is represented in national and foreign anthologies and received the Grand Prize for Poetry from the Luso-American Educational Foundation in 1987.