Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian novelist and short story writer. Her innovation in fiction brought her international renown. She was born in the Ukraine in 1920, but in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Civil War, the family fled to Romania and eventually Brazil. She published her first novel, Near to the Wildheart in 1943 when she was just twenty-three, and the next year was awarded the Graca Aranha Prize for the best first novel. She died in 1977, shortly after the publication of her final novel, The Hour of the Star.

Bruna Dantas Lobato is a fiction writer and translator. Her translation of The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel won the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature.

Other translations received the English PEN Translates Award and the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and were longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, the PEN Translation Prize, and the Republic of Consciousness Prize.

Her debut novel, Blue Light Hours, is forthcoming in October 2024 from Grove Atlantic in the US, and Companhia das Letras/PRH in Brazil (in her own translation into Portuguese).

Mario de Andrade (1893-1945) was a poet, novelist, critic, piano teacher, ethnomusicologist, and a leading figure in Brazilian culture.

He was a central instigator of the 1922 Semana de Arte Moderna (Modern Art Week), which marked a new era of modernism. He spent much of his life pioneering the study and preservation of Brazilian folk heritage and was the founding director of Sao Paulo's Department of Culture.