Chus Pato (Maria Xesus Pato Diaz) was born in 1955 in Ourense, Galicia (north-west Spain). All of her work is written in Galician, a language which is closely related to both Spanish and Portuguese. She teaches History and Geography at a high school in the interior of Galicia. In her words: writing metabolizes the world, even that world that cannot be absorbed into writing. And: I have a predilection for those constructions which investigate the possibility of a language-thinking that refuses to repeat the already-written and lives in contact-lamination with the seams of the unsayable, of what hasn't yet been written into the corporeality of the poem. To me, the poem is a freedom-machine. My autobiography? It does not always seem to be mine; sometimes I would rather have other lives. Insofar as all autobiography participates in fiction, I prefer not to be forced to choose, so I opt not to have one. Politically engaged, Chus Pato is a member of Redes escarlata, a leftist cultural group that supports independence, as well as PEN Galicia.
