Name Luis de | Role Poet | |
Died January 22, 2010, Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil | ||
Luís Romano de Madeira Melo (Ponta do Sol on Santo Antão, Cabo Verde, 10 June 1922 - Brasil, 22 January 2010) was a bilingual poet, novelist, and folklorist who has written in Portuguese and the Capeverdean Crioulo of Santo Antão.
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Born in the northernmost town of Ponta do Sol in the Capeverdean island of Santo Antão, he prefers to refer to the Capeverdean language as "língua cabo-verdiana". He collaborated along with additional publishers and founded the Morabeza review. An independent idealist, he edited local and international literary reviews.
In the late 1950s, Luís Romano joined the ideas of independence and became member of the PAIGC, captured by PIDE, he went to exile in Senegal, then Mauritania and Morocco where he travelled with an engineer from the salt industry, Algiers and Paris, Romano lived in Brazil for the remainder of his life. He visited his home country in Praia during the country's independence in 1975 and returned to Brazil.
He established the official linguistic material of Kriolander in the whole archipelago. He published his first novel Famintos (Famine, Hunger), about the deaths of several Cape Verdeans during the drought of the 1940s, it was written in 1940, as it was censored at the time, it was published in Brazil in 1962. He also wrote poems especially Negrume (Lzimparim) which was published in Rio de Janeiro in 1973.
One of his poem can be found on the CD Poesia de Cabo Verde e Sete Poemas de Sebastião da Gama (2007) by Afonso Dias