Today’s Question by Aart Hilal

Your stories almost never take place in Brazil, which makes some critics not to include your writings in the cannon of Brazilian literature. How do you view this attitude? Do you like to see yourself as a Brazilian writer?
 
On the contrary, my work is being used in schools all over Brazil, and any text book that deals with post 1990 Brazilian literature will certainly make reference to one of my texts. One thing is to write about Brazil and quite another is to see the world through the eyes of a Brazilian – and that is totally present on each line that I write. Nobody ever thought that Hemingway was a Spanish writer, nor that Henry Miller was French, even though both authors have written about countries other than the United States.