Angolan essayist and political activist, Mário Coelho Pinto de Andrade was born on August 21st 1928, in Golungo Alto (Angola).

In 1930, he left for Luanda, where he received elementary education at the Luanda Seminar and concluded, in 1948, secondary studies at the Colégio das Beiras. He then left for Lisbon, in that same year, to study Classical Philology at the Faculty of Letters. Together with other students and intellectuals of lusophone African countries, such as Agostinho Neto, Amílcar Cabral and Francisco José Tenreiro, he created the Centre for African Studies, in 1951, with the purpose of reflecting on important problems for Africa.

In 1954, António de Andrade left for exile in Paris, where he met other African spheres, relating to Leopold Senghor, Nélson Mandela, among others. He was chief-editor, between 1951 and 1958, of the prestigious magazine Présence Africaine and, in 1956, he participated in the 1st Congress of Black Writers and Artists, as well as in the 2nd Cogress, which took place three years later, in Rome.

In the 1960s, he became a political activist and was president of MPLA, between 1959 and 1962 and secretary-general of that movement between 1962 and 1972.

However, he then devoted himself to Sociology and to publishing several anthological books and literary works. In this context, he published Antologia da Poesia Negra de Expressão Portuguesa (Anthology of Lusophone Poetry by Black Authors - 1958), La Poésie Africaine d'Expression Portugaise (1969), Amilcar Cabral - Essai de Biographie Politique (1980), As origens do Nacionalismo Africano (1997), among many others.

He is seen as one the most important Angolan essayists of the 20th century and, having been the first Portuguese-speaking African to write critical and aesthetical-doctrinaire texts on lusophone African poetry, the Angolan Ministry of Culture decided to create the Mário Pinto de Andrade Literary Essay Award.

In 1990, Mário de Andrade died in London.