José Luandino Vieira (born José Vieira Mateus da Graça on 4 May 1935) is an Angolan writer of short fiction and novels. Biography Vieira was born in Lagoa de Furadouro, Ourém, Portugal to impoverished parents—his father was a cobbler, his mother a homemaker from a peasant background—who immigrated to Angola in 1938. He grew up immersed in the African quarters (musseques) of Luanda. He wrote in the language unique to the musseque, a fusion of Kimbundu and Portuguese. Vieira left school at the age of fifteen and worked as a mechanic. He became a literary protegé of the older poet António Jacinto and a collaborator of António Cardoso, another working-class white Angolan writer of his generation.''Vieira is best known for his work in the form of the long short story influenced by African oral narrative. His stories, which he calls estórias, deal with the harsh realities of Portuguese rule in Angola. His best-known work was his early short story collection, Luuanda (1963), which received a Portuguese writers' literary award in 1965, though it was banned by the Portuguese government until 1972 due to its examination of the oppressiveness of the colonial administration in Angola. His novella A vida verdadeira de Domingos Xavier (The Real Life of Domingos Xavier) portrayed both the cruelty of the Portuguese administration and the courage of ordinary Angolans during the colonial period. The French-Caribbean director Sarah Maldoror filmed this novel under the title Sambizanga. Other works include Velhas estórias ("Old Stories"; 1974), Nós os do Makulusu ("Our Gang from Makulusu"; 1974), Vidas novas ("New Lives"; 1975), and João Vêncio: os seus amores ("The Loves of João Vêncio"; 1979). Vieira was jailed briefly in 1959 for pro-independence activism. In 1961, while travelling through Portugal with his wife and four-month-old son to a training course in London organized by his employer, the American company EIMCO, Vieira was arrested and transported to Luanda, where he was imprisoned in the São Paulo prison until 1964.<ref>José Luandino Vieira, Papéis da prisão. Apontamentos. Diário.Correspondência (1962-1971), pp. 1021-1022</ref> In 1964, Vieira, Jacinto and Cardoso were transferred by ship to the concentration camp in Tarrafal, Cabo Verde. Vieira wrote almost all of his fiction in Tarrafal, beginning to publish it—not necessarily in the order in which it was written.--having smuggled his manuscripts out of the camp, after the 25 April 1974 military coup in Portugal. In 1972 Vieira and António Jacinto were released from