Coelho was always a nonconformist and a seeker of the new. When, in the excitement of 1968, the guerrilla and hippy movements took hold in a Brazil ruled by a repressive military regime, Coelho embraced progressive politics and joined the peace and love generation. He sought spiritual experiences travelling all over Latin America in the footsteps of Carlos Castaneda. He worked in the theatre and dabbled in journalism, launching an alternative magazine called 2001. He began to collaborate with music producer Raul Seixas as a lyricist, transforming the Brazilian rock scene. In 1973 Coelho and Raul joined the Alternative Society, an organization that defended the individual's right to free expression, and began publishing a series of comic strips, calling for more freedom. Members of the organization were detained and imprisoned. Two days later, Coelho was kidnapped and tortured by a group of paramilitaries.
This experience affected him profoundly. At the age of twenty-six, Coelho decided that he had had enough of living on the edge and wanted to be 'normal'. He worked as an executive in the music industry. He tried his hand at writing but didn't start seriously until after he had an encounter with a stranger. The man first came to him in a vision, and two month
s later Coelho met him at a cafe in Amsterdam. The stranger suggested that Coelho should return to Catholicism and study the benign side of magic. He also encouraged Coelho to walk the Road to Santiago, the medieval pilgrim's route.
In 1987 a year after completing that pilgrimage, Coelho wrote The Pilgrimage. The book describes his experiences and his discovery that the extraordinary occurs in the lives of ordinary people. A year later, Coelho wrote a very different book, The Alchemist. The first edition sold only nine hundred copies and the publishing house decided not to reprint it.
Coelho would not surrender his dream. He found another publishing house, a bigger one. He wrote Brida (a work still unpublished in English); the book received a lot of attention in the press, and both The Alchemist and The Pilgrimage appeared on bestseller lists.
Paulo has gone on to write many other bestselling books, including The Valkyries, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept, The Fifth Mountain, Manual of the Warrior of Light, Veronika Decides to Die, Eleven Minutes, The Zahir and The Devil and Miss Prym.
Today, Paulo Coelho's books appear at the top of bestseller lists worldwide. In 2002 the Jornal de Letras de Portugal, the foremost literary authority in the Portuguese language, bestowed upon The Alchemist the title of most sold book in the history of the language. In 2003 Coelho's novel Eleven Minutes was the world's bestselling fiction title (USA Today, Publishing Trends).
In addition to his novels, Coelho writes a globally syndicated weekly newspaper column and occasionally publishes articles on current affairs. His newsletter, The Manual On-Line, has over 70,000 subscribers.
Coelho and his wife, Christina Oiticica, are the founders of the Paulo Coelho Institute, which provides support and opportunities for underprivileged members of Brazilian society.
Paulo Coelho The Witch of Portobello
The following extract is taken from The Witch of Portobello, Paulo Coelho's gripping new novel, which is set in London.
The Witch of Portobello will be available from April 2007.
Before these statements left my desk and followed the fate I eventually chose for them, I considered using them as the basis for a traditional, painstakingly researched biography, recounting a true story. And so I read various biographies, thinking this would help me, only to realize that the biographer's view of his subject inevitably influences the results of his research. Since it wasn't my intention to impose my own opinions on the reader, but to set down the story of the 'Witch of Portobello' as seen by its main protagonists, I soon abandoned the idea of writing a straight biography and decided that the best approach would be simply to transcribe what people had told me.
Heron Ryan, 44, journalist
No one lights a lamp in order to hide it behind the door: the purpose of light is to create more light, to open people's eyes, to reveal the marvels around.
No one sacrifices the most important thing she possesses: love.
No one places her dreams in the hands of those who might destroy them.
No one, that is, but Athena.
A long time after Athena's death, her former teacher asked me to go with her to the town of Prestonpans in Scotland. There, taking advantage of certain ancient feudal powers which were due to be abolished the following month, the town had granted official pardons to 81 people - and their cats - who were executed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for practising witchcraft.
According to the official spokeswoman for the Barons Courts of Prestoungrange and Dolphinstoun: 'Most of those persons condemned...were convicted on the basis of spectral evidence - that is to say, prosecuting witnesses declared that they felt the presence of evil spirits or heard spirit voices.'
There's no point now in going into all the excesses committed by the Inquisition, with its torture chambers and its bonfires lit by hatred and vengeance; however, on our way to Prestonpans, Edda said several times that there was something about that gesture which she found unacceptable: the town and the 14th Baron of Prestoungrange and Dolphinstoun were 'granting pardons' to people who had been brutally executed.
'Here we are in the twenty-first century, and yet the descendants of the real criminals, those who killed the innocent victims, still feel they have the right to grant pardons. Do you know what I mean, Heron?'
I did. A new witch-hunt is starting to gain ground. This time the weapon isn't the red-hot iron, but irony and repression. Anyone who happens to discover a gift and dares to speak of their abilities is usually regarded with distrust. Generally speaking, their husband, wife, father or child, or whoever, instead of feeling proud, forbids all mention of the matter, fearful of exposing their family to ridicule.
Before I met Athena, I thought all such gifts were a dishonest way of exploiting people's despair. My trip to Transylvania to make a documentary on vampires was also a way of proving how easily people are deceived. Certain superstitions, however absurd they may seem, remain in the human imagination and are often used by unscrupulous people. When I visited Dracula's castle, which has been reconstructed merely to give tourists the feeling that they're in a special place, I was approached by a government official, who implied that I would receive a 'significant' (to use his word) gift when the film was shown on the BBC. In the mind of that official, I was helping to propagate the myth, and thus deserved a generous reward. One of the guides said that the number of visitors increased each year, and that any mention of the place would prove positive, even a programme saying that the castle was a fake, that Vlad Dracula was a historical figure who had nothing to do with the myth, and that it was all merely a product of the wild imaginings of one Irishman (Editor's note: Bram Stoker), who had never even visited the region.
I knew then that, however rigorous I was with the facts, I was unwittingly collaborating with the lie; even if the idea behind my script was to demythologize the place, people would believe what they wanted to believe; the guide was right, I would simply be helping to generate more publicity. I immediately abandoned the project, even though I'd already spent quite a lot of money on the trip and on my research.
And yet my journey to Transylvania was to have a huge impact on my life, for I met Athena there when she was trying to track down her mother. Destiny - mysterious, implacable Destiny - brought us face to face in the insignificant foyer of a still more insignificant hotel. I was witness to her first conversation with Deidre - or Edda, as she likes to be called. I watched, as if I were a spectator of my own life, as my heart struggled vainly not to allow itself to be seduced by a woman who didn't belong to my world. I applauded when reason lost the battle, and all I could do was surrender and accept that I was in love.
That love led me to see things I'd never imagined could exist - rituals, materializations, trances. Believing that I was blinded by love, I doubted everything, but doubt, far from paralysing me, pushed me in the direction of oceans whose very existence I couldn't admit. It was this same energy which, in difficult times, helped me to confront the cynicism of journalist colleagues and to write about Athena and her work. And since that love remains alive, the energy remains, even though Athena is dead, even though all I want now is to forget what I saw and learned. I could only navigate that world while hand in hand with Athena.
These were her gardens, her rivers, her mountains. Now that she's gone, I need everything to return as quickly as possible to how it used to be. I'm going to concentrate more on traffic problems, Britain's foreign policy, on how we administer taxes. I want to go back to thinking that the world of magic is merely a clever trick, that people are superstitious, that anything science cannot explain has no right to exist.
When the meetings in Portobello started to get out of control, we had endless arguments about how she was behaving, although I'm glad now that she didn't listen to me. If there is any possible consolation in the tragedy of losing someone we love very much, it's the necessary hope that perhaps it was for the best.
I wake and fall asleep with that certainty; it's best that Athena left when she did rather than descend into the infernos of this world. She would never have regained her peace of mind after the events that earned her the nick-name 'the witch of Portobello'. The rest of her life would have been a bitter clash between her personal dreams and collective reality. Knowing her as I did, she would have battled on to the end, wasting her energy and her joy on trying to prove something that no one, absolutely no one, was prepared to believe.