Paulo Scott

Paulo Scott was born in 1966 in Porto Alegre, in southern Brazil, into a working-class family. He studied law at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul and spent a decade as a lawyer and university lecturer before committing to writing full-time. At university he was active in the student political movement and involved in Brazil's re-democratisation process.

He publishes novels, poetry, short stories, and a stage play, and translates from English. His prose is recognisably his own: long, unbroken sentences, a present tense that smears across time, footnotes that stretch for pages. In a 2014 Guardian interview, Scott traced his obsessive relationship with language to a childhood stutter he had to talk his way around for decades.

Nowhere People, published in English by And Other Stories in 2014, centres on the Guaraní people and won Brazil's Prêmio Fundação Biblioteca Nacional in 2012. His short story collection Still Orangutans was adapted into a film that won the Milano Film Festival in 2008. Phenotypes, the English title for his 2019 novel Marrom e Amarelo, was longlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize. Scott has been shortlisted for the Prêmio Jabuti and the Prêmio São Paulo de Literatura.

Phenotypes is the natural entry point for a new reader. It is a tightly plotted novel about two brothers from the same Porto Alegre family, one dark-skinned and one light, whose relationship with racism, guilt, and privilege unravels across three decades. The politics are specific to Brazil, but the emotional core does not require a primer.