Luís Romano de Madeira Melo (10 June 1922 – 22 January 2010) was a bilingual poet, novelist, and folklorist who has written in Portuguese and the Capeverdean Crioulo of Santo Antão.
[1] An independent idealist, he edited local and international literary reviews.
[2] In the late 1950s, Luís Romano joined the ideas of independence and became member of the PAIGC, captured by PIDE, he went to exile in Senegal, then Mauritania and Morocco where he travelled with an engineer from the salt industry,[3] Algiers and Paris, Romano lived in Brazil for the remainder of his life.
[1] In 1985, he wrote a historical book Cem Anos de Literatura Caboverdiana (Hundred Years of Cape Verdean Literature) relating to the past hundred years of literature of his country, it included notable writers of the time such as Eugénio Tavares, Baltasar Lopes da Silva (Osvaldo Alcântara), Jorge Barbosa Manuel Lopes, Henrique Teixeira de Sousa, Sergio Frusoni, Francisco Xavier da Cruz (B. Leza) and Ovídio Martins as well as the Claridade review in which some of the greatest writers took part, as well as Certeza and Morabeza.
[4][5] He also wrote poems especially Negrume (Lzimparim)[1] which was published in Rio de Janeiro in 1973.