Born in Bela Vista do Paraíso in 1965, in the north of Paraná, a state in southern Bra- zil, in 1969, he moved to Peabiru, also within the state of Paraná, where he spent his childhood. Orphaned at the age of 4, he was brought up in a family of illiterate farm- ers. He studied to be an Agricultural Technician and ended up as a slave worker on a farm in Mato Grosso, managing to get out of this trap in order to study literature.

Doctor of Literature from the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), he is the author of novels such as Chove sobre minha infância (Rain on my childhood) (2000), one of the first works of autofiction in Brazilian literature, in which he recounts the 100 years of silence lived by his illiterate family, Um amor anarquista (An Anarchist Love) (2005), about the first anarchist colony in Latin America, A máquina de ma- deira (The Wooden Machine) (2013), a story about the Brazilian priest who invented the first mass-producible typewriter in the world in 1859, A segunda pátria (The Sec- ond Fatherland) (2015), a dystopia about a Brazil aligned with Hitler’s Germany and that hunts blacks, besides the book of stories Hóspede secreto (Secret Guest), with which he received the Cruz e Sousa Prize in 2002. He also won the Binational Brazil- Argentina Arts and Culture Award in 2005. He was a finalist for the São Paulo Litera- ture Award for best novel in 2011 and 2013. He is also competing for this award this year and is a two-time finalist of the Portugal Telecom Award. Miguel Sanches Neto is translated in Argentina, Spain, Canada, Germany, Italy and Cuba. He lives in Ponta Grossa, Paraná, where he is a university professor.

A number of critics have written about him, always enthusiastically: “One of the great moments of our literature,” Wilson Martins, professor emeritus of New York University. “The best author of his generation,” Mario Sabino, Veja magazine. “A lapidary form of expression, like a Truman Capote or a José Cardoso Pires,” Pires Laranjeira, Jornal de Letras (Lisbon).

He has just released Che Guevara’s Bible, a detective novel about Che Guevara’s passage through Brazil before his death in the mountains of Bolivia. This book is considered one of the most important works for understanding contemporary Brazil, where corruption is a constant.