Bio

Thomas Mira y Lopez is the author of The Book of Resting Places (Counterpoint, 2017), named one of the year’s best debut literary nonfiction books by Poets & Writers, and a literary translator from Portuguese. He holds MFAs in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona and Literary Translation from the University of Iowa. His work has received fellowships and support from MacDowell, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, VCCA, Colgate University’s Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship, and the University of North Carolina’s Kenan Visiting Writership. A fiction editor at DIAGRAM, he lives in Iowa City, where he is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Creative Writing and Translation at the University of Iowa.  

Project Description

To support the translation of The Factory Behind the Hill: Selected Stories by José J. Veiga from Brazilian Portuguese. Veiga (1915-99) was a Brazilian fiction writer known for his strange and frequently surreal narratives set in a fictionalized version of his home state of Goiás. Widely considered the country's foremost practitioner of magical realism, Veiga documented the expansion and industrialization of Goiás, which resulted in the construction of the planned city Brasília inaugurated as Brazil's capital in 1960. Through allegory and satire, his fiction also captured the onset of the military dictatorship in 1964. This collection will draw from two published collections of Veiga's work, as well as previously unpublished stories.