Background
Manuel Lopes was born on December 23, 1907 in Mindelo on the island of São Vicente, Cape Verde, which was then a territory of Portugal.
Manuel Lopes was born on December 23, 1907 in Mindelo on the island of São Vicente, Cape Verde, which was then a territory of Portugal.
Manuel Lopes wrote in Portuguese, using expressions typical for Cape Verdean Portuguese and Cape Verdean Creole, he was one of the responsible for describing world calamities of the droughts that caused several deaths in São Paulo Vicente and Santo Antão. He moved to Coimbra in mainland Portugal to attend secondary school. At age 16, he returned to São Vicente and started working at an English company that exploited a transatlantic telegraph cable.
Aged 23, he started working for a similar Italian company, but he lost his job due to the Second World War and settled on his farm on the island of Santo Antão.
In 1944, back in service at his first employer, he transferred to the island of Faial in the Azores. After eleven years on Faial, he moved to mainland Portugal.
He died in Lisbon in 2005. His first work was the poem Monography of Regional Descripions which was published in 1932, Paul was also published in the same year, other included Poems de Quem Ficou in 1949, Cape Verdean Themes in 1950, Creole and Other Poems in 1964, Personagens de Ficção e os seus Modelos in 1971 and an antological poem Falucho Ancorado in 1997.
His poem Naufrágio can be found on the Civil Defense Poesia de Cabo Verde e Sete Poemas de Sebastião da Gama by Afonso Dias.