José Luiz Passos was born in a sugar plantation town in rural Pernambuco, Brazil, in 1971. In his writing he explores the role of memory and outsiders in modern Brazil. His fiction depicts the failure of a pact between the country and the city. He is a professor of Portuguese and Brazilian literatures and cultures at UCLA, where he has served as inaugural director of the Center for Brazilian Studies. Passos is the author of Ruínas de linhas puras (Ruins of Pure Lines, 1998), on Brazilian modernism, and Romance com pessoas (Novels of Personhood, 2008 and 2014), which interprets Shakespeare’s influence on the nineteenth-century realist novel in Brazil. He has published four novels: Nosso grão mais fino (Our Finest Grain, 2009), O sonâmbulo amador (The Amateur Sleepwalker, 2012), winner of the Portugal Telecom Literary Award and the Biennial Brasília Literary Prize for best novel published in 2012 and 2013, O marechal de costas (The Back-Turned Marshal, 2016), and Antologia fantástica da República brasileira (A Fantastic Anthology of the Brazilian Republic, 2017). He has read from his fiction at the Paraty Literary Festival (Flip) and the Rio de Janeiro International Book Fair, Brazil, the Guadalajara International Literary Fair, Mexico, the Flipside Literary Festival, UK, and a number of Brazilian and American universities, including Georgetown, Princeton, and Stanford.

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translator

Lucy Greaves is a literary translator and bike mechanic who lives in Bristol, UK. She enjoys the poetry of bicycles and the mechanics of language equally.