Paulo Coelho

Paulo Coelho was born in 1947 and grew up in Brazil. From a young age, he was interested in literature and hoped to become a writer. He was an introverted and unusual teenager and, at age 17, his family admitted him to a mental hospital. He escaped three times over the course of his three-year stay. In an effort to conform to his parents’ and community’s standards, Coelho enrolled in law school. He dropped out after a year and led a life of wandering and poverty, traveling throughout South America, Mexico, Europe, and Africa. He worked as an actor, a theater director, a journalist, and a songwriter for other artists, before being arrested in 1974 for his “subversive” liberal song lyrics. Coelho’s life was dramatically changed in 1986 when he completed a 500-mile pilgrimage walk in northwestern Spain: the Camino de Santiago (The Way of St. James). While on pilgrimage, Coelho experienced a spiritual awakening which encouraged him to follow his dream of becoming a writer. Coelho appears to pay homage to this transformative experience with the name of The Alchemist’s protagonist: Santiago. Coelho’s most famous novel, The Alchemist, was published in 1988. It was his third book, following an unsuccessful first book Hell Archives (1982), and a non-fiction account of his spiritual awakening on the Camino de Santiago, The Pilgrimage (1986). In 1994, HarperCollins picked up The Alchemist after its small initial printing. After that, it became a worldwide phenomenon, establishing Paulo Coelho as a household name. Since then, Coelho has published regularly, bringing his total published works up to thirty. He continues to write, and he and his wife divide their time between Rio de Janeiro and the Pyrenees Mountains of France.