About the Author

Richard Zenith is an acclaimed translator and literary critic. His translations include Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet and Fernando Pessoa and Co.- Selected Poems, which won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. The recipient of Portugal's Pessoa Prize, Zenith lives in Lisbon.

Reviews

A masterpiece of literary biography ... a tour de force of cultural history. Zenith's achievement is extraordinary. By illuminating this elusive figure Zenith has produced a work in some ways as astonishing as those of Pessoa himself.
*New Statesman*

Mammoth, definitive and sublime. Zenith has written the only kind of biography truly permissible, an account of a life that plucks at the very borders and burdens of the notion of a self.
*New York Times*

A completely superb and magisterial life of Fernando Pessoa. Finally, this extraordinary poet gets the great biography he deserves. Unsurpassable.
*William Boyd*

Even now, Fernando Pessoa remains one of the lesser-known of the truly great writers of the 20th century. This immense, magnificent biography is going to change that... here is a revelation: a modern master to rank alongside Joyce, Kafka, Beckett, say. Such a revolutionary literary discovery seems unlikely to be on offer again. It's that good.
*Sunday Times*

Monumental ... To do justice to the magnitude and complexities of Pessoa Zenith, a translator and literary critic, spent more than a decade collating material. The result is a tour de force.
*Times Literary Supplement*

Erudite, sensitive and entertaining, this multi-faceted portrait pays its giant homage to a man who wasn't there.
*Financial Times*

Monumental ... Zenith brought to the task a depth of scholarship gained through more than 30 years of publishing, translating and promoting his subject's work; Pessoa, who had few intimates in life, is lucky to have found this posthumous friend ... Pessoa really did build an entire city. It was a city that needed a guide. Thanks to Zenith, it has one at last.
*New York Times*

A portrait with bags of personality ... Richard Zenith's massive biography of the Portuguese writer who constructed numerous identities captures his tragicomic oddity.
*Observer*

A truly comprehensive representation of any one person is almost impossible. That very impossibility is largely what makes Richard Zenith's biography of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa so remarkable.
*Literary Review*

Ingenious ... with flashes of charm and wit.
*The Spectator*