André de Leones was born in 1980 in Goiânia, the Goiás state capital, located in central western Brazil. He grew up in Silvânia, a small town founded in the mid-18th century at a time when people from São Paulo spread like cancer across the rest of the country in their search for gold.
He studied at one of three Catholic colleges in Silvânia. His mother, a bank employee, was an avid reader—from Sidney Sheldon to Dostoyevsky, and passed this on to her son. She read as a way to forget her exhausting routine.
André started writing stories and then planned a longer text about growing up in a town darkened by religion and a high suicide rate. Hoje está um dia morto was his first novel, published in 2006. It won the SESC Prize for literature. His stories were later published in 2008 under the title Paz na terra entre os monstrous.
With two published books, André de Leones did what any young person with stories to write and life to live would do: he traveled the world. He lived on the southern coast of Brazil for two years in the city of Paranaguá and then spent six months in Israel. Finally, tired after moving around, he settled in the peaceful city of São Paolo.
While there he wrote and published three more novels. In 2010, his novel Como desaparecer completamente familiarized him with São Paolo. In 2011, Dentes negros came out. It was a painful reunion with his native town camouflaged as post-apocalyptic science fiction stories. In 2013 Terra de casas vazias was released, a tangle of stories about people looking to put themselves back together in a fragmented world where the structure of society imitates the urban design of the Old City of Jerusalem, where part of the novel is set.
André de Leones lives and works in São Paolo and has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. He contributes to the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo, writing on literature. His personal website is vicentemiguel.wordpress.com where he publishes fragments from his books, unedited stories, texts that insist on being called poems, and drafts.
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