Martins, who grew up in Rio’s favelas and did not have any formal study, became a local role model with his debut book

Even after two hours of debate, students of Rio de Janeiro’s most exclusive university ignored the World Cup games playing on a nearby screen and queued in front of guest author Geovani Martins, who had just finished speaking, clutching copies of his debut book for signing.

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Students at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio pay over $900 a month for courses like journalism – four times the minimum salary earned by many workers in nearby favelas like Rocinha and Vidigal, where Martins lives. But PUC also admits black and underprivileged students under a quota system expanded by the leftist presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff.

For some of these young people, Martins is not just a writer; he’s an inspirational star whose stories about life in Rio’s favelas have given voice to their reality. Journalism student Lucas França, 21, who grew up on the poorer edges of Rio’s urban sprawl, asked Martins how he felt about becoming a role model for people like him. Cinema student Gabriel Galvão, 21, said Martins’s book, The Sun on My Head, “legitimises the life experiences of a big part of the population”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Geovani Martins: ‘I knew I would have to be better than the average.’ Photograph: Chico Cerchiaro

Martins’s exhilarating collection of 13 short stories was a hit in Brazil before it was even published in March. Film rights were quickly snapped up, and the book will be published in the UK by Faber & Faber next year. Its success has transformed the life of this unassuming young writer, 26, a former tennis ballboy and painter’s assistant who has become an unexpected literary sensation.

Some of Brazil’s most famous artists and intellectuals have heaped praises on him: musician Caetano Veloso compared one story to the work of the great Brazilian writer João Guimarães Rosa. João Moreira Salles, the founder of the monthly magazine piauí – the country’s answer to the New Yorker – declared nothing less than the arrival of a “new Brazilian literature”.

With long curls tumbling down his T-shirt, a languid intelligence and a gentle smile, he is an unusual literary phenomenon for Brazil.

That is because Martins grew up in Rio’s favelas – which meant, he told his audience, he had had to set his bar high. “I knew I would have to be better than the average,” he said. “I didn’t have any formal study; I wrote it off my own bat.”

He learned to read with his grandmother, who told him family stories and was inspired by the storytellers on the streets where he grew up. As a teenager, he developed a natural writer’s curiosity about what would happen to people around him when they grew up.

“I went crazy about how every human being is a unique story and the possibilities this gave me as a writer,” he said. He was discovered at FLUP, a literary festival in low-income communities, and persuaded his mother – a cook who bought him a Remington typewriter – to let him live at home so he could write. He told her his book would launch his career – and it did exactly that.

“I was very happy it worked out this way,” he said, rolling a cigarette. “Making literature is very involved with affection.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Men overlook the city from the Vidigal favela, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Photograph: Renata Brito/AP

In the hands of a lesser writer, stories like Rolézim – about young men going to the beach and being harassed by police – and Travessia – in which a low-ranking drug gang member drives the body of a man he has just killed to a dump – could be grim and relentless. But Martins turns them into tense, colourful snapshots of the life in these bustling communities, with their heavily armed drug gangs, police oppression and relentless poverty.

He riddles his phrases with favela slang, freestyling into hazy existential monologues when his characters succeed in scoring marijuana – a constant preoccupation in the city he describes. Clara Capitão, his Portuguese editor, compared him to Irvine Welsh, whose 1990s bestseller Trainspotting also featured working-class youth taking drugs and uncompromising vernacular.

But while Welsh was hailed for his originality, playing fast and loose with grammar in Portuguese is heresy for Brazil’s deeply conservative middle classes, who believe that the ability to use the language’s complicated grammar correctly is a sign of intelligence rather than one of an expensive education.

It is a book full of aesthetic pretension, but at the same time it’s a book that is very much on the street Geovani Martins

Tellingly, in Portuguese, the word educação means both “education” and “good manners”.

A row erupted on a Facebook page for parents of students at a leading Rio high school after a teacher recommended The Sun on My Head – and some parents raged over its potential impact on their offspring.



In a review for Rio’s staid O Globo newspaper, writer Juliana Cunha sniffed that one story in Martins’s “above average” book suffered from language a little “cluttered” for anyone not from a favela. Another critic, Eder Alex, described the book as “literal”, “obvious” and overrated on the A Escotilha site.

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Martins shrugged off such concerns. “It is a book full of aesthetic pretension,” he said, “but at the same time it’s a book that is very much on the street.”

Although he has no university education, Martins said the quota system like the one in place at PUC has helped a new generation from Brazil’s lower classes muscle into the country’s intellectual debate – people like his friend, Djamila Ribeiro, who was raised in a working-class family in Santos and has become a celebrated academic, feminist writer and television presenter.

“The market is getting interested in these new voices,” he said. “I can see a really big change.”