26 Facts About Pepetela

Pepetela has written about Angola's earlier history in A Gloriosa Familia and Lueji, and has expanded into satire with his series of Jaime Bunda novels.

Pepetela won the Camoes Prize, the world's highest honour for Lusophone literature, in 1997.

Pepetela was born in Benguela, Portuguese Angola, to Portuguese Angolan parents.

Pepetela's mother's family had been in Angola for five generations, whereas his father was born in Angola to Portuguese parents and spent much of his childhood in mainland Portugal.

Pepetela had a middle-class upbringing in Benguela, attending a school where students of all races and classes intermingled.

Pepetela has claimed that being raised in Benguela gave him more opportunities to befriend people of other races, because Benguela was a much more mixed city than many others in Angola were during the colonial era.

Pepetela had an uncle who was a journalist and writer and who exposed him to many important leftist thinkers.

Pepetela's father had a considerable library that allowed the young Pepetela to learn more about the French Revolution, something that influenced him profoundly.

When he was 14, the young Pepetela moved to Lubango, to continue his studies because there was no high school in Benguela at the time.

In Lubango, Pepetela claimed that he became more aware of the problems of race in Angola, as Lubango was a much more segregated community than Benguela.

Pepetela first went to Paris and then, in 1963, earned a scholarship to study Sociology in Algiers, where he was approached by Henrique Abranches from the MPLA to help create a Center for Angolan Studies.

In 1972, Pepetela published his first novel, As Aventuras de Ngunga, a work that he intended for a small student audience.

Pepetela used this work to create a dialogue between Angolan tradition and his revolutionary ideology, exploring which traditions should be nurtured, and which should be altered.

The novel was written and published while Pepetela was fighting the colonial government on the Eastern Front in Angola.

Pepetela was part of the governing board of the Angolan Writers' Union throughout this period as well.

Pepetela's plays written during his government tenure reflect the themes in As Aventuras de Ngunga.

The next play that Pepetela wrote, A Revolta da Casa dos Idolos, takes place in the past, drawing parallels between the Kongo kingdom in the 16th century and Angola's struggle for independence.

Pepetela himself, as mentioned earlier in this entry, is a descendant of Portuguese settlers in Benguela.

Pepetela continued to write throughout the decade, publishing O cao e os Caluandas, a novel that looks at the inhabitants of Luanda and the changes that they have undergone since independence, one year after the publication of Yaka.

Pepetela spent years researching the story of the Dutch in Angola in order to write the novel.

Pepetela is the first Angolan and the second African author to win this prestigious award.

Pepetela has continued to be a prolific writer throughout the 2000s.

Pepetela's work has taken a satirical turn with the series of "Jaime Bunda" novels, detective novels that cast a satirical view on life in Luanda in the new decade.

The novels were published by the Portuguese publisher Dom Quixote and were extremely popular in Portugal, having had some success in other European countries, such as Germany, where Pepetela had been relatively unknown in the past.

Pepetela's first book to be published in the 2000s was A Montanha da Agua Lilas, a children's book that looks at the roots of social injustice.

Pepetela was a visiting professor at Rutgers University in 2002 and the University of California Berkeley in 2003 and 2004.