Edited by Margarida Calafate Ribeiro and Roberto Vecchi, and published by Edições Afrontamento, the book Antologia da Memória Poética da Guerra Colonial [Anthology of the Colonial War Poetic Memory] will be presented by Joaquim Furtado.

Book contextualization
Between 1961 and 1974, Portugal conducted a war in its colonies Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, mobilizing around a million men and affecting almost every Portuguese family. The experience of the Portuguese participation in this event of undefined historiography positioning, both by its official denial and the country's radical geopolitical reformulation which resulted in the decolonization, turned this event into one of the most complex, as well as tragic, events of the Portuguese contemporaneity.

The collective and individual experience of the Portuguese participation in this event was, and still is, recorded through narrative and critical expressions, as well as an aesthetic expression in several art forms - from painting and sculpture to narrative, from cinema to theatre, from music to poetry. It was, without a doubt, in the literature that the record of this event's collective and individual rewriting became more striking, creating hundreds of novels and thousands of poems. This poetry, from authors who were directly or indirectly involved in the war, written during the experience of the armed conflict or afterwards, as a place of memory and post-traumatic formulation, was the study object of the project Poetry of the Colonial War: the ontology of the shattered ´self´, developed in recent years by the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra, under the scientific supervision of both editors of the present anthology, and funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. The book Antologia da Memória Poética da Guerra Colonial [Anthology of the Colonial War Poetic Memory] is the product of that project, gathering hundreds of poems by one hundred and eighty poets.