João Guimarães Rosa

João Guimarães Rosa (1908 to 1967) was a Brazilian novelist, short story writer, poet and diplomat, born in Cordisburgo in the state of Minas Gerais. He trained and practised as a doctor before beginning a diplomatic career in 1934, serving among other posts as assistant consul in Hamburg. His only novel, Grande Sertão: Veredas, known in English as The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, blends archaic and colloquial prose and many neologisms drawn from the spoken language of the Brazilian backlands, the sertão, and the critic Antonio Candido called it a metaphysical novel. It is often compared with Joyce's Ulysses. He also published four books of short stories in his lifetime, all set in the sertão but touching on universal and existential themes. Self-taught in many languages, he entered the Brazilian Academy of Letters in 1963 and died of a heart attack in 1967, the year he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.