Paulo Coelho

Paulo Coelho was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In 1970 he dropped out of law school and travelled through South America, Mexico, North Africa, and Europe. Returning home in 1972, he began writing pop and rock music lyrics alongside Raul Seixas, a well-known Brazilian singer and songwriter. Over the following years, he worked for Polygram and CBS Records. In 1980, he departed the music industry and travelled again through Europe and Africa — a period that proved decisive for the direction his writing would take.

During that trip, Coelho walked the route of Santiago de Compostela. The experience became the basis for his first book, *O Diário de um Mago*, published in Portuguese in 1987 and in English as *The Diary of a Magus* in 1992, later reissued as *The Pilgrimage*. In 1988, he published *O Alquimista* (*The Alchemist*), which ultimately became an international bestseller. The novel reached readers far beyond Brazil, finding audiences across languages and continents and bringing his work to a genuinely global scale.

Coelho continued writing through the following decades, producing novels including *Veronika Decides to Die*, *The Fifth Mountain*, *Eleven Minutes*, *The Zahir*, *The Devil and Miss Prym*, *The Valkyries*, *Manual of the Warrior of Light*, and *Manuscript Found in Accra*. Rich symbolism and characters navigating journeys — outward across geography and inward — run as a consistent thread through the body of work. *The Alchemist* remains the title most closely associated with his name and continues to circulate widely in translation.