Paulo Coelho's inspirational biography

PAULO COELHO was born in Rio de
Janeiro in August 1947, the son of Pedro
Queima Coelho de Souza, an engineer,
and his wife Lygia, a homemaker. Early
on Coelho dreamed of an artistic career,
something frowned upon in his middleclass
household. In the austere
surroundings of a strict Jesuit school
Coelho discovered his true vocation: to be
a writer. Coelho’s parents, however, had
different plans for him. When their
attempts to suppress his devotion to
literature failed, they took it as a sign of
mental illness. When Coelho was
seventeen, his father twice had him
committed to a mental institution where he
endured sessions of electroconvulsive
“therapy.” His parents brought him to the
institution once more after he became
involved with a theater group and started
to work as a journalist.
Coelho was always a nonconformist and
a seeker of the new. In the excitement of
1968, the guerrilla and hippy movements
took hold in a Brazil ruled by a repressive
military regime. Coelho embraced
progressive politics and joined the peace
and love generation. He sought spiritual
experiences by traveling all over Latin
America in the footsteps of Carlos
Castaneda. He worked in theater and
dabbled in journalism, launching an
alternative magazine called 2001. He
began to collaborate as a lyricist with
music producer Raul Seixas, transforming
the Brazilian rock scene. In 1973 Coelho
and Seixas joined the Alternative Society,
an organization that defended the
individual’s right to free expression, and
began publishing a series of comic strips
calling for more freedom. Members of the
organization were detained and
imprisoned. Two days later Coelho was
kidnapped and tortured by a paramilitary
group.
This experience affected him
profoundly. At the age of twenty-six
Coelho decided that he had had enough of
living on the edge and wanted to be
“normal.” He worked as an executive in
the music industry. He tried his hand at
writing, but didn’t start seriously until
after he had an encounter with a stranger.
The man first came to him in a vision; two
months later Coelho met him at a café in
Amsterdam. The stranger suggested that
Coelho should return to Catholicism and
study the benign side of magic. He also
encouraged Coelho to walk the Road to
Santiago, the medieval pilgrim’s route.
In 1987, a year after completing that
pilgrimage, Coelho wrote The
Pilgrimage. The book describes his
experiences and his discovery that the
extraordinary occurs in the lives of
ordinary people. A year later Coelho
wrote a very different book, The
Alchemist. The first edition sold only nine
hundred copies and the publishing house
decided not to reprint it.
Coelho would not surrender his dream.
He found another publishing house, a
bigger one. He wrote Brida (a work still
unpublished in English); the book
received a lot of attention in the press, and
both The Alchemist and The Pilgrimage
appeared on bestseller lists.
Paulo went on to write many other
bestselling books, including The
Valkyries, By the River Piedra I Sat
Down and Wept, The Fifth Mountain,
Warrior of the Light: A Manual, Eleven
Minutes, The Zahir, and The Devil and
Miss Prym.
Today, Paulo Coelho’s books appear at
the top of bestseller lists worldwide. In
2002 the Jornal de Letras of Portugal, the
foremost literary authority in the
Portuguese language, bestowed upon The
Alchemist the title of book with most
copies sold in the history of the language.
In 2003 Coelho’s novel Eleven Minutes
was the world’s bestselling fiction title
(USA Today, Publishing Trends).
In addition to his novels, Coelho writes
a globally syndicated weekly newspaper
column and occasionally publishes
articles on current affairs. His newsletter,
Warrior of the Light Online, has over
seventy thousand subscribers.
Coelho and his wife, Christina Oiticica,
are the founders of the Paulo Coelho
Institute, which provides support and
opportunities for underprivileged
members of Brazilian society.