Pereira Gómes, Soeiro Joaquim

Born 1909; died 1949. Portuguese writer and public figure. Member of the Central Committee of the Portuguese Communist Party. Representative of the neorealistic school in Portuguese literature.

In his first novel, The Gutters (1944; in Russian translation, Those Deprived of Childhood, 1952), Pereira Gómes revealed his country’s social ills. As an opponent of A. Salazar’s fascist dictatorship, he lived in hiding for many years and was imprisoned several times. His books about the struggle of the Portuguese people and the Communists for freedom, Red Stories (1949) and The Lost Refuge (1950), were published posthumously, as was the unfinished novel The Coupling (1951).