Richard Zenith

Richard Zenith (born 23 February 1956, Washington, D.C.) is an American-Portuguese writer and translator, winner of the Pessoa Prize in 2012.

[2][3] Zenith is widely considered[4] to be one of the foremost experts on the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa.

[6] Zenith curated, together with Carlos Felipe Moisés, the much acclaimed exhibition Fernando Pessoa, Plural como o Universo, dedicated to Pessoa's life and heteronyms, at Lisbon's Gulbenkian Foundation,[7] São Paulo's Museum of Portuguese Language[8][9] and Rio de Janeiro's Centro Cultural Correios.

Written on and off over a period of more than 20 years, seemingly beginning as a book by another of Pessoa's heteronyms, Vicente Guedes, and slowly evolving into the imaginary testament of Soares, it is a dishevelled album of thoughts, sensations and imagined memories that can never be fully deciphered.

Despite this disclaimer, readers of Zenith's edition will find it supersedes all others in its delicacy of style, rigorous scholarship and sympathy for Pessoa's fractured sensibility.