Portolani for Our Times Patricia Lança's Web Site PROFILE |
PATRICIA LANCA is a writer, researcher and translator who also writes under the name of PATRICIA McGOWAN PINHEIRO. Daughter of a Portuguese father and a mother of Irish origin, she was born in 1925 near Liverpool and brought up in England. She has lived and worked more than half her adult life in other countries including the United States, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Morocco, Algeria, France and Portugal. During the Second World War she was evacuated for a year and a half from England to the USA with her mother and her brother, Victor, returning to England in December 1941. She volunteered to enter the British forces in 1943 and served for two years in the women's branch of the British Army, the Auxiliary Territorial Service. She has attended the University of Liverpool and McGill University, Montreal, where she studied Law,and the University of London where she studied Philosophy for two years at Birkbeck College and Educational and Business Studies at Philippa Fawcett College of Education. She studied Economics and Foreign Trade at the Institute of Export, London. She has been employed as a journalist, a shipping clerk and a secondary school teacher. She has lived in Portugal since 1974 and was elected to its parliament in 1987 where she sat for four years as a Deputy of the Social Democratic Party for the District of Setúbal. Throughout her adult life she has been deeply interested in and involved in politics. From her student days in 1942 till she was 'mugged by reality' in the fifties and sixties, she was an active communist and a member both of the British Communist Party and its Canadian equivalent, where she learned a great deal about marxism and its failures. The articles and essays in the following pages were written over a period of thirty years in an attempt to combat the persistent mythologies of marxism and the neo-marxists which inform so much of contemporary academia, the media and political life generally. She is the author of two books in Portuguese: O Bando de Argel, Lisbon, 1979 and Misérias do Exílio, Lisbon, 1998.* Oldest Ally: A Portrait of Salazar's Portugal , Dennis Dobson, London, 1961 was written in collaboration with Peter Fryer.** Translations: Aquilino Ribeiro, When the Wolves Howl, (Quando os Lobos Uivam) London, 1963. Eça de Queiroz, The Maias (Os Maias) with Anne Stevens, London, 1963. * An account of the political life of Portuguese exiles in Algeria during the last months of the life of anti-Salazar oppositionist General Humberto Delgado, and events that led up to his assassination in 1965. **This book was a strong and often partial critique of the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal.Its authors were banned from entering the country for several years after its publication.
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| Me 1943 Me 2003 |
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