Paulo Coelho

Brazilian · born 1947

Born Paulo Coelho de Souza on August 24, 1947, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, he was the son of an engineer father and a devout Catholic mother who sent him to a Jesuit school, where the discipline pressed against an early longing to write. At seventeen, after he announced that ambition again, his parents had him committed to a psychiatric clinic, where he was given electroconvulsive therapy. He escaped three times before his release at twenty. He drifted, enrolled briefly in law school, dropped out, wandered through South America, North Africa, Mexico, and Europe as a hippie, and returned to Brazil to write lyrics for the rock musician Raul Seixas. In 1974 he was arrested and tortured by the military government for what authorities called subversive activities. The turning point came in 1986, when he walked the Camino de Santiago across northern Spain, an experience he described as a spiritual reordering. He distilled it into The Pilgrimage (1987), then in 1988 published The Alchemist, the parable of an Andalusian shepherd boy following his dream to the pyramids. A small Brazilian press issued nine hundred copies and declined to reprint. HarperCollins took it up in 1994 and the book climbed slowly to become one of the best-selling novels in publishing history, translated into eighty-three languages with more than three hundred million copies sold. He followed it with Veronika Decides to Die (1998), drawing on his asylum years, and a long shelf of fables, essays, and autobiographical novels. Elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters in 2002, he lives with his wife, the artist Christina Oiticica, in Geneva.