Paulo Scott – författare

Winner of the Machado de Assis PrizeDriving home, law student Paulo passes a figure at the side of the road. The indigenous girl stands in the heavy rain, as if waiting for something. Paulo gives her a lift to her family’s roadside camp.With sudden shifts in the characters’ lives, this novel takes in the whole story: telling of love, loss and family, it spans the worlds of São Paulo’s rich kids and dispossessed Guarani Indians along Brazil’s highways. One man escapes into an immigrant squatter’s life in London, while another’s performance activism leads to unexpected fame on Youtube.Written from the gut, it is a raw and passionate classic in the making, about our need for a home.

Winner of the 2023 Jabuti Prize in the Brazilian Book Published Abroad categoryLonglisted for the 2022 International Booker PrizeFederico and Lourenço are brothers. Their father is black, a famed forensic pathologist for the police; their mother is white. Federico – distant, angry, analytical – has light skin, which means he’s always been able to avoid the worst of the racism that Brazilian culture has to offer. He can ‘pass’ as white, and yet, because of this, he has devoted his life to racial justice. Lourenço, on the other hand, is dark-skinned, easy-going, and well-liked in the brothers’ hometown of Porto Alegre – and has become a father himself.As Federico’s fiftieth birthday looms, he joins a governmental committee in the capital. It is tasked with quelling the increasingly violent student protests rocking Brazil by overseeing the design of a software program that will adjudicate the degree to which each university applicant is sufficiently black to warrant admittance under new affirmative-action quotas. Before he can come to grips with his feelings about this initiative, not to mention a budding romance with one of his committee colleagues, Federico is called home: his niece has just been arrested at a protest carrying a concealed gun. And not just any gun. A stolen police service revolver that Federico and Lourenço hid for a friend decades before. A gun used in a killing.Paulo Scott here probes the old wounds of race in Brazil, and in particular the loss of a black identity independent from the history of slavery. Exploratory rather than didactic, a story of crime, street-life and regret as much as a satirical novel of ideas, Phenotypes is a seething masterpiece of rage and reconciliation.

Als der Jurastudent Paulo in seinem VW-Käfer die 14jährige Autostopperin Maína mitnimmt, verändert sich das Leben der beiden. Das Mädchen aus dem Indianercamp an der Ausfallstraße von Porto Alegre und der politisch engagierte Sohn aus gutem Hause kommen sich schnell näher – und doch nie wirklich nahe; zu unterschiedlich sind die beiden Welten, die hier aufeinanderprallen.Erst Donato, ihrem gemeinsamen Kind, gelingt es, das Unvereinbare zusammenzubringen. Alleingelassen von Vater und Mutter, wächst er zu einem jungen Mann heran, der unwissentlich in die Fußstapfen seiner Eltern tritt: Die Stimme seiner Mutter im Ohr – auf einer Tonbandkassette mit Guaraní-Legenden –, entlarvt Donato die Selbstzufriedenheit einer ganzen Gesellschaft.Paulo Scotts Roman hat in Brasilien viel Aufmerksamkeit erhalten. Seine Figuren stehen sinnbildlich für die brasilianische Geschichte der vergangenen 25 Jahre, und gehen mit der portugiesisch-indianischen Begegnung von Paulo und Maína an die Ursprünge der brasilianischen Literatur zurück.Ein beeindruckender, dichter Roman, der den Preis der Brasilianischen Nationalbibliothek für den besten Roman 2012 erhielt und hervorragend ins Deutsche übertragen wurde von der Saramago-Übersetzerin Marianne Gareis.