Mário Cesariny de Vasconcelos

Mário Cesariny was born in Lisbon, Portugal, the youngest child and only son of Viriato de Vasconcelos and María de las Mercedes Cesariny, a Spaniard of French but originally Italian ancestry.

Later he joined the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, where he met André Breton in 1947.

After being acquainted with the surrealist movement, Cesariny moved away from the neorealist movement, important at the time in the country for being composed mainly by members of the resistance against the fascist leaning regime of Oliveira Salazar.

From 1960 until April 25, 1974, Cesariny was mercilessly harassed by the Portuguese Polícia Judiciária for being a suspect of vagrancy, a euphemistic term used by the police in those days for homosexuality, which the poet lived courageously in spite of persecution.

This fact shows up several times in his writings in a veiled way ("Lisboa-os-Sustos") and was one of the causes of his intermittent stayings in Great Britain and France during the 1960s and 1970s.