Eduardo Pitta
Is life a wound?
Does the heart throb and pound?
Is blood a blind wall?
What if suddenly — all?
Portuguese poet, fiction writer and essayist. He was born in Lourenço Marques, present-day Maputo, on 9 August 1949; he died on 25 July 2023.
EDUARDO PITTA was a Portuguese poet, fiction writer and essayist. He was born in Lourenço Marques, present-day Maputo, on 9 August 1949, and lived in Mozambique until 1975. He published ten books of poetry, in which one can follow his development from a hermetic expression of the colonial situation to an expressionism centred on the subject’s (homo)sexual identity. A large selection of that corpus of poems was collected in Desobediência (2011). A significant part of his essays, critical writings and chronicles was collected in six volumes.
In Fractura (2003), an essay on the homosexual condition in contemporary Portuguese literature, Pitta described representations of homotextuality from a perspective dealing with «identity negotiations». With his trilogy of short stories Persona (2000), his writing underwent a tectonic movement. One of these stories, Kalahari, was translated by Alison Aiken and published in Chroma, a Queer Literary Journal, in London. Cadernos Italianos (2013) is a travel notebook and Cidade Proibida (2007) is his first novel.
Pitta’s poetry and prose have been published in magazines and anthologies in Portugal, Spain, France, Brazil, the United States, Israel and, in his early years (1967-1975), Mozambique. In 2001, he edited a special issue on contemporary Portuguese literature for the French magazine Arsenal. He was a literary critic for the Portuguese magazine Sábado from 2011 onwards. He was also a columnist for the literary magazine LER between 2008 and 2014, and in the same magazine he was a poetry critic for more than a decade (1994-2006). Since 1982 he participated in many public readings of his work in Portugal and elsewhere, as well as in several international literary conferences and poetry festivals in Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Greece and Colombia. In 2013 he published the memoir Um Rapaz a Arder. Pitta legally married Jorge Neves in 2010, his partner since 1972.