Paulo was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in August 1947, the son of Pedro Queima Coehlo de Souza, an engineer, and his wife, Lygia, a homemaker. Early on, Paulo dreamed of an artistic career, something frowned upon in his middle-class household. In the austere surroundings of a strict Jesuit school, Paulo discovered his true vocation: to be a writer. Paulo’s parents however, had different plans for him. When their attempts to suppress his devotion to literature failed, they took it as a sign of mental illness. When Paulo was seventeen, his father had him committed to a mental institution, twice, where he endured sessions of electroconvulsive therapy. His parents brought him back there once more after he became involved with a theater group and started to work as a journalist.
Paulo was always a nonconformist and a seeker of the new. When, in the excitement of 1968, the guerrilla and hippie movements took hold in a Brazil ruled by a repressive military regime, Paulo embraced progressive politics and joined the peace and love generation. He sought spiritual experience, traveling all over Latin America in the footsteps of Carlos Castaneda. He worked in the theater and dabbled in journalism, launching an alternative magazine called 2001. He began to collaborate with music producer Raul Seixas as a lyricist, transforming the Brazilian rock scene. In 1973, Paulo and Raul joined the Alternative Society, an organization that defended the individual’s right to free expression, and began publishing a series of comic strips, calling for more freedom. Members of the organization were detained and imprisoned. Two days later, Paulo was kidnapped and tortured by a group of paramilitaries.
This experience affected him profoundly. At the age of twenty-six, Paulo decided that he had had enough of living on the edge and wanted to be “normal”. He worked as an executive in the music industry. He tried his hand at writing but didn’t start seriously until after he had an encounter with a stranger. The man first came to him in a vision, and two month later Paulo met him at a café in Amsterdam. The stranger suggested that Paulo should return to Catholicism and study the benign side of magic. He also encouraged Paulo to walk the Road of Santiago de Compostela, the medieval pilgrim’s route.
In 1987, a year after completing that pilgrimage, Paulo wrote The Pilgrimage: Diary of Magus. The book describes his experiences and his discovery that the extraordinary occurs in the lives of ordinary people. A year later, Paulo wrote a very different book, The Alchemist. The first edition sold only nine hundred copies and the publishing house decided not to reprint.
Paulo would not surrender his dream. He found another publishing house, a bigger one. He wrote Brida a work still unpublished in English) that received a lot of attention in the press and both The Alchemist and the pilgrimage appeared on bestseller lists. The Alchemist went on to sell more copies than any other book in Brazilian literary history.
Paulo’s story doesn’t end there. He has gone on to write many other bestselling books that have touched the hearts of people everywhere: By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept, the Fifth Mountain, Veronica Decides to Die, the Devil and Miss Prym, Warrior of the Light: A Manual, The Zahir, and Eleven Minutes.
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