RESEARCH
FAVOURITE AUTHOR
Paulo Coelho
Introduction
Paulo Coelho (born 24 August 1947) is a Brazilian lyricist, novelist and a member of the
Brazilian Academy of letters since 2002. His 1988 novel, “The Alchemist” became an
international best-seller.
Early Life
Paulo Coelho was born on 24 August 1947 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and attended a Jesuit
school. At age 17, Coelho's parents committed him to a mental institution from which he
escaped three times before being released at the age of [Link] later remarked that "It
wasn't that they wanted to hurt me, but they didn't know what to do... They did not do that to
destroy me, they did that to save me."
On his parents' wishes, Coelho enrolled in law school and abandoned his dream of becoming a
writer. One year later, he dropped out and lived life as a hippie, travelling through South
America, North Africa, Mexico, and Europe and started using drugs in the 1960s.
Songwriting
Upon his return to Brazil, Coelho worked as a songwriter, composing lyrics for Elis Regina, Rita
Lee, and Brazilian icon Raul Seixas. Composing with Raul led to Coelho being associated with
magic and occultism, due to the content of some songs. He is often accused of these songs
being rip-offs of foreign songs not well known in Brazil at the time. In 1974, by his account, he
was arrested for "subversive" activities and tortured by the ruling military government, who had
taken power ten years earlier and viewed his lyrics as left-wing and dangerous. Coelho also
worked as an actor, journalist and theatre director before pursuing his writing career.
In 1986, Coelho walked the 500-plus-mile Road of Santiago de Compostela in northwestern
[Link] the path, he had a spiritual awakening, which he described autobiographically in The
[Link] an interview, Coelho stated "[In 1986], I was very happy in the things I was doing.
I was doing something that gave me food and water – to use the metaphor in The Alchemist, I
was working, I had a person whom I loved, I had money, but I was not fulfilling my dream. My
dream was, and still is, to be a writer." Coelho would leave his lucrative career as a songwriter
and pursue writing full-time.
Writing
In 1982, Coelho published his first book, Hell Archives, which failed to make a substantial
[Link] 1986, he contributed to the Practical Manual of Vampirism, although he later tried to
take it off the shelves since he considered it "of bad quality." After making the pilgrimage to
Santiago de Compostela in 1986, Coelho wrote The Pilgrimage, published in 1987.
While trying to overcome his procrastination about launching his writing career, Coelho decided,
"If I see a white feather today, that is a sign that God is giving me that I have to write a new
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book." Seeing one in the window of a shop, he began writing that
day. The following year, Coelho wrote The Alchemist and published it through a small Brazilian
publishing house that made an initial print run of 900 copies and decided not to reprint it. He
subsequently found a bigger publishing house, and with the publication of his next book Brida,
The Alchemist took off. HarperCollins decided to publish the book in 1994. Later, it became an
international bestseller. In a 2009 interview with the Syrian Forward Magazine, Coelho stated
that the Sufi tradition had been an influence on him, particularly when writing The Alchemist and
later The Zahir.
Since the publication of The Alchemist, Coelho has generally written at least one novel every
two years. Four of them – The Pilgrimage, Hippie, The Valkyries and Aleph – are
autobiographical, while the majority of the rest are broadly [Link] books, like Maktub,
The Manual of the Warrior of Light and Like the Flowing River, are collections of essays,
newspaper columns, or selected teachings. His
work has been published in more than 170 countries and translated into eighty-three languages.
Together, his books have sold 320 million
copies. On 22 December 2016, Coelho was listed by UK-based company Richtopia at number 2
in the list of 200 most influential contemporary authors.
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