Afonso Ribeiro Space

Afonso Ribeiro, born in Vila da Rua, in the municipality of Moimenta da Beira, was born on 07/01/1911 and died in 1993 in Cascais. He studied in Viseu and Oporto, where he completed his primary school diploma and taught in various schools. He was a pioneering author of the neorealist movement, known as a literary current of the 20th century, marked by political ideologies that described the social truth of the working classes. Afonso Ribeiro, who had a pastoral view of the rural man, proclaimed the need to look at the rural world through different eyes, saying: "A very badly made world. Some with everything and others with nothing. Men working for other men, like servants. Will it always be like this? (...) The land belongs to those who work it, the fields belong to those who cultivate them." Inlusão e a Morta, 1938, a book of novels, is one of the many excerpts from Afonso Ribeiro's works that denounced the beginning of a new literary current, neorealism. The writer emigrated to Mozambique where he managed to re-establish contacts with different neorealist writers where they published their work in local publications. On his return to Portugal, Afonso continued to write and publish his works, always collaborating with the newspapers o Diabo and Sol Nascente and in the magazine Vértice. It could be considered that the author knew about social inequalities, the needs of the disadvantaged classes, slavery and its difficulties, but it was these certainties and his vision of the rural man that led him to take inspiration from his prose and translate a message of freedom and hope for a favorable future.