Fabrício Corsaletti was born in Santo Anastacio, in the west of São Paulo state in 1978, and he has lived in the city of São Paulo since 1997. He studied literature at the University of São Paolo (USP) and in 2007, he published the volume Estudos para o seu corpo with Companhia das Letras, which brings together his first four poetry books: Movediço (Labortexto Editorial, 2001), O sobrevivente (Hedra, 2003) and the then unpublished História das demolições and Estudos para o seu corpo.

He is also author of the short stories compiled in King Kong e cervejas (Companhia das Letras, 2008); the novel Golpe de ar (Editora 34, 2009); the poems in Esquimó (Companhia das Letras, 2010, which received the Bravo! Literature Award the same year), and Quadras paulistanas (Companhia das Letras, 2013). He also wrote Baladas (Companhia das Letras, 2016) and Todo poeta é un bar (Quelonio, 2018); the chronicles in Ela me da capim e eu zurro (Editora 34, 2018) and Perambule (Editora 34, 2018), as well as the children’s books, Zoo (Hedra, 2005), Zoo zureta (Companhia das Letrinhas, 2010), Zoo zoado (Companhia das Letrinhas, 2018) and Poemas com macarrão (Companhia das Letrinhas, 2018). Together with Alberto Martins, he wrote Caderno americano (Luna Parque, 2016), which brings together prose poetry by both authors about Latin America. He also worked with Samuel Titan Jr. to translate 20 poemas para leer en el tranvía into Portuguese, by the Argentinian writer Oliverio Gironda (Editora 34, 2014).

A bilingual anthology of his poems, translated into Spanish by Mario Cámara and Paloma Vidal, was published in Argentina with the title Feliz con mis orejas (Lux/Grumo, 2016). From 2010 to 2019, he was a columnist for the magazine São Paulo, in the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo, where he published articles and poems every two weeks.

Andréa del Fuego is a Brazilian writer born in São Paulo in 1975. She studied philosophy at the University of São Paulo (USP) and is currently taking a master’s degree in philosophy, with a major in aesthetics, through which she is researching the work of Raduán Nassar in an analysis of Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

She has written seven fiction books, which include the novel Os Malaquias, winner of the José Saramago Prize and whose rights were sold to Israel, France, Argentina, Italy, Croatia, Sweden, Romania, Germany and Portugal.

She was a columnist of the Entrelinhas program of TV Cultura and she collaborated with the magazines Pesquisa FAPESP, Revista do Núcleo Interdisciplinar do Imaginário e Memória da USP, and EntreClássicos, among others.

She received the Incentive Grant for Literary Creation from the Secretary of State for Cul­ture of Sao Paolo, with which she wrote and published the work Engano seu. Her short novel Sofia, o cobrador e o motorista won the 2º Literatura para Todos Prize, awarded by the Minis­try of Education. Her novel for young adults Sociedade da caveira de cristal was selected for the PNBE 2009, the national school library program and the Apoyo al Saber Program in 2012, both with an estimated readership of millions. She wrote the novel As miniaturas with the literary creation grant of the Petrobrás Cultural Program, and sold the rights to Argentina, France and Portugal.

Marcelino Juvêncio Freire was born in Sertânia, Pernambuco, Brazil in 1967. He attended the Guadalajara International Book Fair in December 2013 as part of the Destinação Brazil program, where he introduced himself as follows:

“I wouldn’t know how to live without literature. I am a coward. I am only brave when I write. It is when I feel most rage. My words become weapons. Write there. I love Mexico. Without ever having stepped foot in Mexico. My literature has a lot of Mexico in it. The colors. The grito. Death. The people. The borders there are borders here. Mexicans are north-eastern. Stubborn. Write there. Write that I sign below. For us. For me.”

In his home state, he self-published AcRústico (1995) and EraOdito (1998). Later, the critic João Alexandre Barbosa recommended Ateliê Editorial, where he went on to publish the short story anthologies Angu de Sangue (2000) and BaléRalé (2003). He published Contos Negreiros (2005), winner of the Jabuti Prize 2006 and RASIF – Mar que Arrebenta (2008) with Record Editorial.

His work as a “cultural agitator” -as he calls himself- is broad. In 2002, he conceived and published Coleção 5 Minutinhos, with which he launched the publishing house eraOdito editOra.

Since 2003, he has worked as an editor at the magazine PS:SP and since 2006, he has directed the Balada Literaria event, which brings together Brazilians and people from oversees to the Vila Madalena neighborhood of São Paulo. He is also a member of the independent art collective EDITH, with which he published his latest short story collection Amar é crime (2011).

In 2013, he published his first novel titled Nossos ossos, with the publisher Record. Marcelino Freire has been considered one of the most important authors of Brazilian literature today and his short stories have appeared in diverse narrative anthologies, both in Brazil and overseas, including Geração 90 (2001) and Os Transgressores (2003). He published his latest book Bagageiro in 2018, a compilation of essays. He currently dedicates a lot of his time to cultural diffusion and giving narrative workshops

Jacques Fux is author of the novels Antiterapias (Scriptum, 2012) and Textofilia, (Scriptum, 2019). He won the São Paulo Literature Award in 2013 with his book Brochadas: confissões sexuais de um joven escritor (Rocco, 2015); the National Prize of the City of Belo Horizonte in 2014 for Meshugá: um romance sobre a loucura (Olympio, 2016); and the Manáus Literature Prize in 2016. He also wrote Nobel (José Olympio, 2018).

He has also written the essays Literatura e Matemática: Jorge Luis Borges, Georges Perec and o OULIPO (Perspectiva, 2016). He won the Capes Award for the best thesis in literature/ linguistics in Brazil in 2011 and was the finalist of the APCA Prize in 2016 with Georges Perec: a psicanálise nos jogos e traumas de uma criança de guerra (Relicario, 2019). He wrote the children/young adult’s book O enigma do Infinito (Positivo, 2019), which was a finalist for the Barco a Vapor Award in 2016.

In 2017, he was invited to be a guest on the main program of the FLIP – the Paraty International Literature Fair. His books have been published in Italian: Sulla Follia Ebraica (Editora Giuntina), Spanish: Antiterapias (Editora Textofilia), and Hebrew: Antiterapias (Editora Carmel) in 2019.

He studied mathematics and earned a master’s degree in computer science, as well as two doctorates; one in comparative literature at the Universidad Federal de Minas Gerais, UFMG, and one in Language, Literature and French Civilization at Université de Lille, France. He carried out his postdoctoral studies in literary theory at the Universidad de Campinas (UNICAMP), the UFMG and Centro Federal de Educación Tecnológica de Minas Gerais (CEFETMG). He was a researcher at Harvard University (2012-2014), and has been a guest speaker at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard, Cornell and University of Boston, Wellesley College in Stockholm and Sorbonne University. He was a writer-in-residence at Ledig House in New York.

Gustavo Pacheco was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1972. He is a Doctor of Anthropology and a diplomat, and has worked in Buenos Aires, Mexico City and Brasilia, where he lives today.

Convinced of the need to bring Brazil closer to the rest of Latin America, he translated the works of Roberto Arlt, Julio Ramón Ribeyro and Patricio Pron into Portuguese. Convinced of the need to bring Brazil closer to Portugal, he codirects (with Pedro Mexia) the magazine Granta en lengua portuguesa, published and distributed in both countries.

He is a columnist for the magazine Época and collaborates with different publications such as Revista Quatro Cinco Um, Suplemento Pernambuco and Folha de S. Paulo.

As a writer, he seeks to provoke at least a fraction of the pleasures and disturbances that he often feels as a reader. That’s how he found stories like those of Li Xun, the bureaucrat who specialized in reincarnation; Julia Pastrana, the ugliest woman in the world, and Thomas Manning, the taxidermist who detests computers. These and other stories are in his first book of short stories, Alguns humanos (Tinta da China, 2018), published in Brazil and Portugal, winner of the Clarice Lispector Prize awarded by the Fundação Biblioteca Nacional do Brasil.

Are words [a] part of our body? That is what I wonder since I was a child, when I was already in love with magic words, blessings, oracles. I was born in 1990 and grew up in Diadema, then, the most violent city in Brazil. I thought words changed the world. On television. In the conversations. From a young age I learned: things are what we say about them.

Can we transform the world by words? I started to wonder. Not in childhood books or in newspapers written in adolescence. Then, when I went to college, I felt foreign again. They talked about another Brazil. Mine was invisible.

Things are what we say about them, can I talk too?

I decided to write and publish. I used to write just for myself, secret spells, blessings for crises, oracles. I studied in the masters the relationship between body, possession and writing. I did a drama course, I won contests. I made a webdocumental. I won creation scholarships. I launched a book of poems, wrote one of stories. I searched, I searched, I found.

Owned by my family’s story, I wrote my first novel, Desesterro (2015). I told family counsel that I had not heard before. I told a story of amazement, not about ghosts but about being a woman in deep Brazil. I left a bipolar crisis with the book in my hands. It was my first investigation of the women’s body as a landscape. Of my body as memory.

Desesterro won some of the main Brazilian awards. I was a finalist in others. On behalf of that novel, I appeared in the Forbes Brasil selection of those under 30. I participated in events inside and outside the country.

I continued with my search of the relationship between words and body. I began to learn with traditional stories, oriental myths, philosophies that do not separate the inside and the outside. I looked in the theater, in lucid dreams, in tarot, in medicines. I do courses, I read, I live. I share (even online). And it was in that context that I wrote Meu corpo ainda quente (My still hot body, to be published, supported by Itaú Cultural), the story of a teenager learning to live in a borrowed body.

I searched. I still search. I will always be searching. From the word that impacts the body. Of poetry that opens windows in the organs.