Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), the Portuguese poet who wrote under dozens of invented personalities called heteronyms, is the subject of Richard Zenith's biography. Zenith, a translator and Pessoa scholar, draws on the vast archive of papers Pessoa left in a wooden trunk and on unpublished family letters. He places the life within the nationalist politics of European history and traces the backstories of nearly all the heteronyms, showing how each was a projection, spin-off or metamorphosis of the poet. The book covers the nine childhood years Pessoa spent in Durban, South Africa, the adolescence in which the first heteronyms emerged, and his struggle to make a living translating and publishing. Allen Lane issued it in London as Pessoa: An Experimental Life.

Tyler Cowen put it on his Marginal Revolution list of the best non-fiction books of 2021.