Luis Patraquim

Poet, playwright, screenwriter and journalist Luís Carlos Patraquim was born in Maputo, Mozambique, in 1953. A man with firm beliefs, Patraquim was a political refugee in Sweden from 1973 to 1975. He was on the founding team of the Mozambican Information Agency along with Mia Couto and others and has worked for the Mozambican National Film Institute and Mozambican TV. In 1986 he moved to Portugal. Patraquim writes for cinema and the theatre and is a contributor to several publications, amongst them Tempo magazine, COLÓQUIO/Letras and África magazine. In 1980 he published his first novel, Monção. His literary approach, a poetic language of fusion, complexity and humanism, has caused many to regard him as successor to the great Mozambican poet José Craveirinha. Committed to the values of social justice and humanism, Patraquim does not shy away from exposing the wounds of an emerging society in a country shattered by the civil war.