Jaime Montestrela was a Portuguese poet and writer.

Biography

Jaime Monstestrela was born in 1925. His mother was from Madrid, his father a Portuguese surgeon. He belongs to this generation of Portuguese writers of the Salazar dictatorship years, which counts among its ranks Augusto Abaleira or Eugenio de Andrade

Eugénio de Andrade

Eugénio de Andrade was the pseudonym of José Fontinhas, GOSE, GCM , a Portuguese poet.José Fontinhas was born at Póvoa de Atalaia, Fundão. He is revered as one of the leading names in contemporary Portuguese poetry...

. He studied medicine and began a career in psychiatry

Psychiatry

Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the study and treatment of mental disorders. These mental disorders include various affective, behavioural, cognitive and perceptual abnormalities...

 at the Miguel Bombarda hospital, Lisbon. In 1950, he published a book of poetry, Prisão under the name of Jaime Caixas, named after the prison where political dissidents were tortured and imprisoned.
Exiled in Brazil

Brazil

Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...

 in 1951, he moved to Rio de Janeiro

Rio de Janeiro

Rio de Janeiro , commonly referred to simply as Rio, is the capital city of the State of Rio de Janeiro, the second largest city of Brazil, and the third largest metropolitan area and agglomeration in South America, boasting approximately 6.3 million people within the city proper, making it the 6th...

, was naturalized and became a friend of the writer and critic Jorge de Sena, before leaving the country in 1965, when the military seized power.
He moved to Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, where he died in 1975 from a vascular incident.
Its texts are traversed by the questions of God's absence, of the physical decline. Capable as well of humor or gravity, lyricism or scatology, he was a friend of Surrealist

Surrealism

Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....

 artists and members of the Oulipo

Oulipo

Oulipo is a loose gathering of French-speaking writers and mathematicians which seeks to create works using constrained writing techniques. It was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais...

.

Books

• Prisão (1950)
• Cidade de lama, (1962)
• Contos aquosos, (1974)