麻豆社

Fernando Pessoa is Portugal鈥檚 national poet and a giant of 20th Century literature but he鈥檚 also a writer who multiplied himself, who wrote under dozens of alter egos, ranging from an engineer trained in Glasgow in Scotland, to a hunchback who is helplessly lovesick, to a doctor and Latin scholar who鈥檚 a fervent Royalist. His masterpiece The Book of Disquiet, considered to be one of the defining works of modernist literature, is equally fragmented - written on scraps of paper and consisting of hundreds of virtually unordered manuscripts. So what makes Fernando Pessoa such a great writer and so relevant today? Joining Rajan Datar to discuss Fernando Pessoa and his many selves are his translator and biographer Richard Zenith, and the literary scholars and Pessoa experts Dr Mariana Gray de Castro and professor Bernard McGuirk.

(Photo: Statue of Portuguese poet and writer Fernando Pessoa outside Caf茅 Brasilera, Lisbon, Portugal. Credit: Anne Khazam/麻豆社)