Passos, José Luiz
José Luiz Passos is Full Professor of Portuguese and Brazilian literatures at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he also directed the Center for Brazilian Studies until 2011. He is the author of Ruínas de linhas puras (Ruins of Pure Lines, 1998) – on Brazilian modernism – and Romance com pessoas (Novels of Personhood, 2014), which interprets Shakespeare’s influence on Machado de Assis’s fiction. In 2009, he published his first novel, Nosso grão mais fino (Our Finer Grain), followed by O sonâmbulo amador (The Amateur Sleepwalker, 2012), a finalist for the São Paulo Prize, and the winner of the 2013 Portugal Telecom Literary Prize for best novel and best book of the year, as well as the 2014 Brasília Literary Prize for best novel. He is the author of a play and short stories published in Argentina, Brazil, and the United States. Photo courtesy of Kate Griffin, taken at the Literary Translation Winter School in Paraty in July 2014.