Moacyr Jaime Scliar (born March 23, 1937) is a Brazilian writer and physician. Scliar is best known outside Brazil for his 1981 novel Max and the Cats (Max e os Felinos), the story of a young man who flees Berlin after he comes to the attention of the Nazis for having had an affair with a married woman. Making his way to Brazil, his ship sinks, and he finds himself alone in a dinghy with a jaguar who had been travelling in the hold.[1] The story of the jaguar and the boy was picked up by Yann Martel for his own book Life of Pi, winner of the 2002 Man Booker Prize, in which Pi is trapped in a lifeboat with a tiger

João Antônio Ferreira Filho was a Brazilian journalist and short story writer, who became known for portraying the lives of marginalized people inhabiting the outskirts of large cities, such as bandits, workers, vagrants and malandros. Born into a family of small shopkeepers in a suburb of São Paulo, João Antônio worked in low paid jobs before releasing his first collection of short stories, Malagueta, Perus e Bacanaço, in 1963, for which he won several awards: two Jabuti Prizes (best new author and best book of short stories), the Prêmio Fabio Prado and the Prêmio Municipal da Cidade de São Paulo. The double Jabuti award was an unprecedented feat for a rookie writer. Malagueta was originally written in 1960 but the manuscript was destroyed in a fire. Antonio then spent the following two years rewriting it. This literary success led him into a career in journalism, his first job being with the Jornal do Brasil. He was a member of the founding team of Realidade magazine (1966), which published the first short story of Brazilian journalism, Um Dia No Cais (1968). He subsequently worked for Manchete magazine, the newspaper O Pasquim and various alternative press outlets, opposing the military regime in Brazil. During this period, João Antonio alternated residence between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. In 1967, he married Marilia Mendonça Andrade; his only son, Daniel Pedro, was born in the same year. In the late 1960s he decided to radically change his life. He quit his job, sold his car, left his wife and began to devote himself entirely to literature. Antônio wrote fifteen books in total, but he always refused to participate in ceremonies and to join groups and literary academies, only accepting invitations to speak at schools and universities. He traveled throughout Brazil in 1978 and Europe in 1985. In 1987 he was awarded a scholarship and settled in Germany, where he remained until 1989. During this period, he also visited the Netherlands and Poland, holding numerous conferences. Antônio died alone in 1996, in Rio de Janeiro, his body only being discovered fifteen days after his death.

Lygia Fagundes Telles (born April 19, 1923) is a Brazilian novelist and short-story writer. She was born in São Paulo and is one of Brazil's most important living writers. Her first book of short stories, Praia Viva (Living Beach), was published in 1944. In 1949 got the Afonso Arinos award for her short stories book O Cacto Vermelho (Red Cactus). Among her most successful books are Ciranda de Pedra (The Marble Dance) (1954), Verão no Aquário (1963), Antes do Baile Verde (1970), Seminário dos Ratos (1977) and As Horas Nuas, (1989). The book Antes do Baile Verde won the Best Foreign Women Writers Grand Prix in Cannes (France) in 1969. Her most famous novel is As Meninas (The Girl in the Photograph), which tells the story of three young women in the early 1970s, a hard time in the political history of Brazil due to the repression by the military dictatorship. In 2005 she won the Camões Prize, the greatest literary award in the Portuguese language.[1] She is one of the three female members of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. From Wikipedia

Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian writer. Acclaimed internationally for her innovative novels and short stories, she was also a journalist. Born to a Jewish family in Podolia in Western Ukraine, she was brought to Brazil as an infant, amidst the disasters engulfing her native land following the First World War. She grew up in northeastern Brazil, where her mother died when she was nine. The family moved to Rio de Janeiro when she was in her teens. While in law school in Rio she began publishing her first journalistic work and short stories, catapulting to fame at age 23 with the publication of her first novel, 'Near to the Wild Heart' (Perto do Coração Selvagem), written as an interior monologue in a style and language that was considered revolutionary in Brazil. She left Brazil in 1944, following her marriage to a Brazilian diplomat, and spent the next decade and a half in Europe and the United States. Upon return to Rio de Janeiro in 1959, she began producing her most famous works, including the stories of Family Ties (Laços de Família), the great mystic novel The Passion According to G.H. (A Paixão Segundo G.H.), and the novel many consider to be her masterpiece, Água Viva. Injured in an accident in 1966, she spent the last decade of her life in frequent pain, steadily writing and publishing novels and stories until her premature death in 1977. She has been the subject of numerous books and references to her, and her works are common in Brazilian literature and music. Several of her works have been turned into films, one being 'Hour of the Star' and she was the subject of a recent biography, Why This World, by Benjamin Moser.

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, often known as Machado de Assis, Machado, or Bruxo do Cosme Velho, (June 21, 1839, Rio de Janeiro—September 29, 1908, Rio de Janeiro) was a Brazilian novelist, poet, playwright and short story writer. He is widely regarded as the most important writer of Brazilian literature. However, he did not gain widespread popularity outside Brazil in his own lifetime. Machado's works had a great influence on Brazilian literary schools of the late 19th century and 20th century. José Saramago, Carlos Fuentes, Susan Sontag and Harold Bloom are among his admirers and Bloom calls him "the supreme black literary artist to date."