playing in the goan bands in the swinging sixties bonaventure dpietro of chinvar anjuna was once praised by goan music maestro chris perry as a tenor sax player of much promise but it was another goan music legend alfred rose who echoed the sentiment of many konkani readers and praised him as goas james hadley chase for his novels in roman script konkani but dpietro considers himself a living martyr for konkani worried that konkani hardly had any writers and seized with the sentiment that konkani would vanish if not nurtured he quit his job in bombay and headed home to goa to pursue his labour of love write in konkani his work earned him recognition and fulfillment but not monetary success besides being a musician and a novelist dpietro is also a tiatrist and journalist not only did he compose and sing cantaram in tiatr he wrote and directed his own tiatr and acted along with some of the best on the konkani stage including minguel rod kid boxer alfred rose and m boyer aficionados of tiatr praised dpietro for the quality of his scripts but his tiatr never achieved commercial success though dpietro straddled all these creative fields with natural ease it was konkani literature that he loved most and it is to the quest of preserving and promoting konkani that he has dedicated his life to fittingly the goa government honoured dpietro with the state cultural award for literature in 20072008 he was born bonaventure peter fernandes on july 14 1943 in adulthood he would adopt the name of bonaventure dpietro he learnt the violin in the anjuna church school and in his late teens migrated to bombay in short pants to become somebody in life he intended to become a tiatrist but ended up becoming a writer the creative journey was hard he remembers being much perturbed by supporters of marathi claiming that konkani was not a proper language but only a dialect of marathi i had to prove to them that konkani was an independent language he says his first published work a novella called soitanacho ghutt satans secret was published in 1958 when he was just 15 but his first official novel kallea vistidachi choli girl in black was published in 1972 to much acclaim and won him the literary award from the konkanni bhasha mandal other novels followed including clara mhojea paicho fondd my fathers grave from goa with love mog vo patok love or sin maka jieunk zai 1977 i want to live jimmy and others his personal favourite is ek bhett mungllurchea xarak 1977 a visit to mangalore city a book he wrote without ever having visited mangalore the book won him the 1977 literary award from the konkani bhasha mandal dpietro wrote nine novels in the roman script konkani greatly enriching konkani literature his more serious works include the books nazarethkar 2000 his own personal spiritual experience of jesus christ and songit doulot goenkaranchi 2004 music wealth of goans