Julio Monteiro Martins was born in Niterói, State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1955, and died in Pisa, Italy, in 2014. “Fellow in Writing” at the University of Iowa, he had taught Creative Writing in Brazil, Portugal and the U.S. before arriving in Italy, in 1996, where he taught a course of Portoguese Language and Literary Translation at the University of Pisa.

For several years, in Brazil, he carried on his political commitment along with his literary activities. After graduating in Law, he was among the founding fathers of the Brazilian Green Party and also member of the environmentalist movement Os Verdes. Advocating for human rights, he worked as a lawyer for the Centro Brasileiro de Defesa dos Direitos da Criança e do Adolescente, where he dealt with the safety of street children, the so-called meninos de rua. He published nine books including short story collections, novels and essays, such as Torpalium (1977), Sabe quem dançou? (1978), A oeste de nada (1981) and O espaço imaginário (1987).

When he moved to Italy, he settled down in Lucca where he run a narrative workshop as part of a Master in Creative Writing in a school he himself had founded and called Sagarana, along with a literary review of the same name, in 1999 (www.sagarana.net). He also published: Il percorso dell’idea (Petits poèmes en prose, 1998); the short story collections Racconti italiani (2000), La passione del vuoto (2003), L’amore scritto (2007); the metanovel Madrelingua (2005) and L’irruzione, a short story which was included in the anthology Non siamo in vendita – Voci contro il regime (2002). In 2013 he published his poetry collection La grazia di casa mia and, in 2015, his interview essay La macchina sognante, published posthumously.