Ferreira Gullar
A poet, writer, and artist, Ferreira Gullar (b. 1930), the pen name of José Ribamar Ferreira, is the central figure of the Brazilian poetry movement the Neo-Concretes. Exiled by the Brazilian government from 1964 to 1985, Gullar worried that he’d meet the gruesome fate of so many other exiled writers and this fear inspired him to write his best-known work, Poema Sujo, or Dirty Poem. The poem spans one hundred pages and was written to be a sort of last will and testament. Gullar is considered one of the most influential Brazilians and Latin American writers of the twentieth century. Form and diction play significant roles in Gullar’s writing which is often peppered with memorable imagery and lyric verses. Gullar was awarded the Jabuti prize in 2007 and was elected as a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters in October 2014. He currently lives and writes in Rio de Janeiro.