Manuel Ferreira (writer)

He took commerce and phamaceutic courses at the lyceums. He graduated in Social Sciences at the Technical University of Lisbon.

During his military service, he was mobilized on an expeditionary journey to Cape Verde, in 1941, he had stationed for six years until 1947. In the city of Mindelo on the island of São Vicente, he lived with Cape Verdean intellectual groups who worked in the reviews Claridade and Certeza.[5]

He married the Cape Verdean writer Orlanda Amarílis and raised two children Sérgio Manuel Napoleão Ferreira who was born in Cape Verde and Hernâni Donaldo Napoleão Ferreira who was born in Goa.

After stationed in Cape Verde, he visited Goa which was in Portuguese India and Angola, he also visited other African countries. Manuel Ferreira became a profound student of the Portuguese expression culture of its former colonies and was considered, one of the most diverse international circle, a world authority on its material. Its essay work and fiction by himself - which had denounced the colonial repression by the Fascist regime - it profoundly a marking in his experiences in the former Portuguese colonies where the author lived.[6]

Its African literary essays in Portuguese, alongside with its anthologies on African poetry, it was considered essential for the studies of the writers of creation. Whether for keeping its literary work, whether for differences in African literature in the Portuguese language, it had considered with the African writer of Portuguese expression, which refers to a great universality of the language by Camões.

Manuel Ferreira published a fictional short story titled Grei in 1944, later he published a novel A Casa dos Motas in 1950, works which forms a single neo-realist sense that makes u the most important movement in contemporary Portuguese literature. It had his works that had African inspiration who assumed the identical profile.[7]

Other than his romanesque and essay works, a part of his work were translated into other languages including English, Ferreira was the same author of children's books. He was a teacher and scholar in African literature, he published numerous works and founded and headed a review named "África – Literatura, Arte e Cultura" ("Africa - Literature, Arts and Culture") and ALAC editions. Since the restoration of democrary in Portugal, it was created at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon, a chair of African Literature in the Portuguese language. He contributed several Portuguese and foreign periodical publications and with Vértice and Seara Nova, organized, mainly as anthologies in No Reino de Caliban (3 volumes, 1975, 1976 and 1996) and 50 African Poets: Selective Anthologies (50 Poetas Africanos: Antologia Seletiva) in 1989.

He was awarded the Fernão Mendes Pinto in 1958 for Morabeza, Ricardo Malheiros Award in 1962 for Hora di Bai and the Cultural Press Award (Prémio da Impresa Cultural) for A Aventura Crioula (A Creole Adventure) in 1967.

In 1988, he was interested in an essay names Que Futuro para a Língua Portuguesa em África?, the African emeritus which "was five" [African nations] that took part "in the principle of its language and a cultural fact", transformed Portuguese into a "orality plan and a writer plan". "For himself, the future would be like this" A language that is none for all, without a master. And if there is a language, the Portuguese language, there are different variants: the variant of Guinea-Bissau, the variants of Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, the variants of Angola, Mozambique Brazil, Galicia, East Timor and the variant of Portugal.[8] Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Mozambique and East Timor has different languages, Cape Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe has Creole languages, and parts of Brazil speaks different languages, Galician is a separate language, the language resembles Portuguese.

In the last years of his life, he was a retired professor at the Faculty of Letters at the University of Lisbon,[9]

• Manuel Ferreira article at Encyclopædia Britannica