THE HETERONYM
He kept people in a trunk. Dozens of them — not pen names, not characters, but fully realised people, each with their own biography, their own philosophy, their own handwriting. Alberto Caeiro who believed the soul did not exist and wrote the most serene poetry of the twentieth century from inside that belief. Álvaro de Campos who wanted everything, who raged and exulted in the same breath. Ricardo Reis the stoic who accepted everything and felt nothing. And Bernardo Soares, who could not leave his room, who wrote The Book of Disquiet in fragments over decades.
Fernando Pessoa himself barely existed. He was the space between the others.
In this workshop we follow what Pessoa discovered — that the self is not singular, that plurality is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be inhabited, that the voice that writes is never quite the voice that lives.
Who else are you?
Who this workshop is for
Writers who feel that the voice that writes is not always the same as the voice that lives. Anyone interested in plurality, identity and what the self actually is. Readers who have felt that Pessoa's work knows something about them that they have not yet fully understood.
You do not need to have read Pessoa. You need to be willing to discover that you contain more than one person.
What the workshop covers
We open with the trunk — the physical object, the twenty-five thousand manuscript pages discovered after Pessoa's death, the dozens of identities inside it. We read across the heteronyms — poems by Caeiro, de Campos, Soares — asking what it means that these radically different minds came from the same person.
We move into The Book of Disquiet — Soares who could not leave his room and wrote everything from the window. The fragment as a form. The gap as a subject. We ask what the writing produces when it stops trying to be coherent.
There is optional writing toward the end — writing as someone who is also you but not you.
Details
Online via Zoom · Thursday 7th January 2027 · 7.30pm-9.30pm GMT
Open to anyone with a serious interest
Places limited to fifteen
Price: £35