Chico Buarque

Chico Buarque de Hollanda is a Brazilian musician, novelist, and playwright born in 1944 in Rio de Janeiro. He is one of the most beloved and influential cultural figures in Brazilian history, celebrated both as a musician — the composer of hundreds of iconic Brazilian songs — and as a novelist of considerable sophistication. Buarque published his first novel Estorvo (Turbulence) in 1991 and has since published several more, including Benjamim (1995), Budapest (2003), Leite Derramado (Spilt Milk, 2009, Premio Jabuti), and O Irmão Alemão (My German Brother, 2014). His fiction is known for its formal inventiveness, its darkly comic sensibility, and its engagement with Brazilian history and identity. As a musician, Buarque is a giant of the MPB (Música Popular Brasileira) tradition, having composed songs that became hymns of the resistance to Brazil's military dictatorship. He is a figure of moral authority in Brazilian public life. He received the Prémio Camões in 2019, the highest recognition in Portuguese-language literature. The prize honored both his literary and musical achievement and his decades of cultural and political courage in the face of censorship and authoritarianism.