Bruna Dantas Lobato

Bruna Dantas Lobato is a fiction writer, translator of Brazilian literature, and Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Grinnell College.

Her debut novel, Blue Light Hours, was published in 2024 by Black Cat/Grove Atlantic in North America and is forthcoming in several languages—including Portuguese, in her own translation. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Guernica, A Public Space, and The Common, and has received support from MacDowell, Yaddo, Jentel, A Public Space, NYU, Disquiet International, and more.

Her translation of The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel won the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature. Other translations have received the English PEN Translates Award and the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and have been longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, the PEN Translation Prize, and the Republic of Consciousness Prize.

Dantas Lobato has taught creative writing at New York University, the Bennington College MFA in Writing, Bread Loaf, the Center for Fiction, and Catapult. She holds an MFA in Fiction from NYU, an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa, and a BA in Literature from Bennington College. Born and raised in Natal, Brazil, she lives in Iowa.