Author
Julia Dantas
Julia Dantas
Júlia Dantas is a Brazilian writer, editor, and translator born in Porto Alegre in 1985. She is the author of several works of fiction and is recognised as one of the most original voices in contemporary Brazilian literature for her sharp humour, psychological insight, and inventive narrative structures.
Her debut novel, Ruína y Leveza, was shortlisted for the Açorianos Literary Prize (2014) and the São Paulo Literary Prize (2016). Her second book, Ela se Chama Rodolfo (2022), won the AGES and ARL literary prizes. Her most recent novel, A Mulher de Dois Esqueletos (2024), was longlisted for the Oceanos Prize, one of the leading literary awards in the Portuguese-speaking world, and won two categories of the Minuano Prize.
Dantas’s work blends autofiction, metafiction, and social commentary, engaging critically with gender, politics, and contemporary Brazilian culture. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in major Brazilian literary publications, and she frequently collaborates with literary magazines and cultural institutions.
During the pandemic, she co-curated the anthology Fake Fiction (2020) and published the pamphlet Pássaros da Cidade in Parêntese Magazine. Her work explores fear, displacement, and the intersections of personal and political life.
Translator
Lucía Collischon
Lucía Collischon
Lúcia Collischonn is a Gaúcha translator from Brazil, based in London. She holds a PhD in Translation Studies from the University of Warwick and works primarily with contemporary Brazilian fiction and exophonic writing (specially in German and English). Her published translations include work by Yoko Tawada, Michelle Buss, and Eltânia André, across poetry and prose. She translated Tawada’s Etüden im Schnee into Brazilian Portuguese (Todavia, 2019), and her English-language translations have appeared in No Man’s Land, Modern Poetry in Translation, and Qorpus. Her monograph, Literary Exophonic Translation (Cambridge University Press, 2025), explores multilingualism and the politics of literary translation and is central to her defence of L2 translation and translators. Apart from academic writing, she has also written about the mutt translator for the anthology Violent Phenomena (2022), published by Tilted Axis Press. She works across Portuguese, Spanish, English and German. Her practice is shaped by her positionality as a Brazilian translator working between literary systems, with particular attention to multilingual writing and shifting narrative voices.
Original language
Portuguese
Publishing status
Translation extract
About the book
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About the book
About
A Mulher de Dois Esqueletos is a formally inventive triptych exploring gendered labour, motherhood, displacement, and political collapse. In the opening novella, a young Brazilian woman finds herself trapped in a makeshift migrant camp on the Panama–Costa Rica border at the onset of the pandemic. From this, a piece of autofiction in which a writer confined at home during lockdown contends with her increasingly intrusive partner. And in the final part, a woman grapples with a fundamental dilemma: is there room in a single lifetime to devote oneself to raising a child and to artistic creation?
What our readers say
“A lot of what the book deals with still feels close and recognisable, especially the sense of uncertainty and pressure underneath ordinary daily life. Because of that, I found it quite easy to connect with the narrator and the world of the book.
What stood out to me most was the voice. The language feels very direct and oral, almost as if the narrator is thinking through things while speaking. That gives the writing a lot of momentum, and it also makes the heavier or more unsettling moments surprisingly easy to stay with.
I also liked the way the humour works alongside the more serious aspects of the book. The tone can seem casual or even funny on the surface, while something more uncomfortable is always there underneath. I liked that the book doesn’t overexplain those shifts. It lets them sit there and trusts the reader to feel the tension without pushing it too hard.
In the end, the main thing I kept coming back to was the narrator’s voice. It gives the whole book its energy, and I can imagine that being one of the things readers connect with most strongly in English too.”
– Anonymous
Awards
AGES Prize 2025
Minuano Prize for Best Novel and Book of the Year 2025
Semifinalist Oceanos Prize 2025
Rights available
UK English