José Maria Ferreira de Castro was a Portuguese writer and journalist. Ferreira de Castro had a long career in journalism, and considered his fiction writing to be an extension of his documentary reporting; in that regard, he is considered to be one of the fathers of contemporary Portuguese social-realist fiction, a forerunner of socially-committed literature about the rural and working classes later further established by Alves Redol, and more than once a nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
