Poets

Born in a small town in central Portugal, Ruy Belo received a law degree at the University of Lisbon, in 1956, and a PhD in Canonical Law at the St. Thomas Aquinas University in Rome, in 1958. A devout Roman Catholic as a young man, he was a member of Opus Dei for ten years, quitting the organization in 1961. In that same year he published his first collection of poems and began studying Romance Languages and Literature at the University of Lisbon. He finished the course in 1967 and worked in Madrid as a Lecturer in Portuguese from 1971 to 1977. Ruy Belo also wrote literary criticism and translated: Montesquieu, Saint-Exupéry, Cendrars, Lorca and Borges. He died at his home in Queluz, outside Lisbon.