Paulo Coelho

Paulo Coelho is a Brazilian lyricist and novelist, born in Rio de Janeiro. Coelho is renowned for authoring 1988 novel The Alchemist, which was an international best-seller.

At the age of 17, when he disobeyed the rules of his Roman Catholic upbringing, his parents sent him in a mental health facility. Eventually Coelho dropped the law school in 1970, and went around Europe, North Africa, South America, and Mexico.

After returning home in 1972, he started penning pop and rock song lyrics with well-known Brazilian singer-songwriter Raul Seixas. Due to accusations of subversive activity against the Brazilian government, Coelho spent a short period in jail in 1974.

Following his release, he continued to work for CBS Records and Polygram until 1980, at which point he left to make further trips to Europe and Africa. He traveled the 500 miles (800 km) Santiago de Compostela route during this journey, which was originally utilized by pilgrims making their way from France to Spain in the middle ages.

His debut novel, O diário de um mago (1987), was inspired by this lengthy trip and rekindled interest in Catholicism. It was released in English as The Diary of a Magus in 1992 and reprinted as The Pilgrimage in 1995.

Biography of Paulo Coelho

Brazilian author Paulo Coelho was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on August 24, 1947. He is well-known for his use of complex symbolism to illustrate his characters' travels, which are often driven by spiritual inspiration.

Novelist and songwriter Paulo Coelho de Souza is Brazilian. The Alchemist, his book, is his most well-known work. He established an online Paulo Coelho Foundation, in 2014.

Brazilian-born Paulo Coelho went to a Jesuit school. Coelho's dream as a youth was to become a writer. When his mother learned of this, she said, "My dear, your father works as an engineer. He is a sensible, rational individual with a very distinct worldview. Are you really familiar with the definition of a writer?"

Because of his shyness and reluctance to accept conventional wisdom, Coelho's parents sent him to a mental hospital when he was seventeen. Before being allowed to leave the facility three times, he was twenty years old.

After coming back to Brazil, Coelho wrote songs for Rita Lee, Elis Regina, and the legendary Brazilian Raul Seixas. Because of the subject of several of his songs, Coelho's association with magic and occultism arose from his collaboration with Raul.

Ten years after seizing power, the reigning military government detained Coelho in 1974 on charges of "subversive" activity because they believed his songs to be harmful and left-wing. Prior to focusing on his literary career, Coelho had positions as a theatrical director, journalist, and actor.

Coelho married the artist Christina Oiticica in 1980. The two currently live permanently in Geneva, Switzerland; earlier, they had split their year between a rural home in the French Pyrenees Mountains and Rio de Janeiro.

It was a life-changing experience for Coelho to walk the more than 500-mile Road of Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain in 1986. In The Pilgrimage, Coelho writes autobiographically about the spiritual enlightenment that occurred while he was traveling.

Coelho said in an interview, "I was very delighted with what I was doing in 1986. I had a person I loved, money, and I was working at a job that provided me with food and water, so to borrow the metaphor from The Alchemist, I was living the life I had dreamed of. Writing has always been and continues to be my dream." Coelho decided to give up his successful songwriting career to focus only on writing.

His foundation, the Paulo Coelho Institute, was established in 1996 to serve older people and children.

With millions of followers on Facebook and Twitter, Coelho publishes content on his blog up to three times a week. In an August 2014 Wall Street Journal interview, he spoke about his engagement with readers via social media.

In November 2014, he took another step when he completed uploading almost 80,000 documents, including manuscripts, diaries, pictures, reader letters, and news clippings. He established a virtual Paulo Coelho organization in addition to the actual organization, which has its headquarters in Geneva.

Career of Paulo Coelho

Coelho's first novel, Hell Archives, was released in 1982 but did not have a significant effect. He wrote an article for the Practical Manual of Vampirism in 1986, but he subsequently attempted to have it removed from circulation because he thought it was "of bad quality."Coelho authored The Visit, which was released in 1987 after his 1986 Santiago de Compostela visit.

In an attempt to get over his reluctance to start writing, Coelho made the decision, "If I see a white feather today that is a sign that God is giving me that I have to write a new book." He started writing that day after spotting one in a store window. Coelho wrote The Alchemist the following year, which was released by a small Brazilian publishing business that decided to wait to reprint it after an initial print run of 900 copies.

After that, he discovered a larger publishing business, and The Alchemist took off after the release of his next novel, Brida. In 1994, HarperCollins decided to release the book. Subsequently, it achieved global bestseller status. Coelho said in a 2009 interview with the Syrian Forward Magazine that the Sufi tradition had influenced him, especially when he was writing The Alchemist and The Zahir.

Ever since The Alchemist came out, Coelho has consistently produced a novel every two years or more. The Pilgrimage, Hippie, The Valkyries, and Aleph are the four autobiographical ones; the remaining ones are largely fictitious.

Other books include collections of essays, newspaper articles, or particular teachings; examples are Maktub, The Manual of the Warrior of Light, and Like the Flowing River. His writings have been translated into 83 languages and published in over 170 countries. His books have collectively sold 320 million copies. The UK-based firm Richtopia put Coelho at number two on their list of the 200 most important contemporary writers on December 22, 2016.

Criticism of his literature has yet to be without dispute. Despite the fact that he was reared in a Catholic home and still identifies as a Catholic, his position has been criticized for being at odds with Catholic teaching due to its relativist, New Age, and pantheist elements. Reviews of Coelho's latter work have regularly pointed out its superficiality, regardless of his sales figures.

Basketball player Kobe Bryant reached out to him in 2016 to talk about working on a children's book project. They had begun writing the book together a few months before Bryant died in a helicopter crash in January 2020. Still, Coelho erased the whole work after learning of his passing, stating in an interview that "it didn't make any sense to publish without him." He did not specify the number of pages written or if the book had a title.

It was revealed in 2018 that Coelho had committed to a television series that will center on the characters from his books The Witch of Portobello, Brida, and The Devil and Miss Prym.