Born into a middle-class Lisbon family of mixed Jewish, aristocratic and Azorean descent, his father died when he was 5, and two years later his mother married the Portuguese consul in Durban, South Africa, where Pessoa spent his teens. He was educated at Durban High School and at the University of the Cape of Good Hope, Cape Town, and became fluent in English.

Pessoa returned in Portugal in 1905 and never left it again. He soon abandoned his university studies and from then on maintained himself by translating commercial correspondfence into English, which allowed him to live modestly but adequately. His external life was uneventful and he died in relative obscurity. He devoted his main energies to poetry and was involved in the major literary controversies of the day.

Towards the end of his life he began to be recognised by the next generation of poets and since then his reputation has grown both in Portugal and internationally. Today he is recognised as one of the great European modernist poets, and in Portugal he is regarded as the greatest poet of the 20th century and has been accorded the status of a national hero.

In 1920 he came close to marrying Ophelia Queiroz, an office girl, but withdrew and told her in a letter 'My destiny belongs to a different law, whose existence some do not even suspect'. There is not direct evidence that Pessoa was homosexual, but the fact that he never married, his friendship with a number of openly gay writers and the evidence of his own work point in this direction.

Pessoa was the editor of the review "Athena" (1924-25) and wrote for "Orpheu," the most important Modernist review. Much of his work is in English, including "Antinous" (1918), "35 Sonnets" (1918), and "Inscriptions" (1920)

He created four stylistically distinct heteronyms: "Fernando Pessoa" - the Symbolist; "Alberto Caeiro" - the pastoral seer; "Alvaro de Campos" - the Futurist; "Ricardo Reis" - the elegant classicist.