PinT Book Club 18th session

Welcome to the 18th meeting of PinT Book Club! Join us to discuss City of God alongside Brazilian author Paulo Lins and translator Alison Entrekin. This will be a bilingual event (English and Portuguese). The novel was published in 2006 by Bloomsbury Publishing.

About the book

THE ORIGINAL NOVEL BEHIND 'THE GREATEST CRIME FILM OF ALL TIME'

Cidade de Deus, the City of God ... welcome to one of Rio's most notorious slums. A place where the streets are awash with drugs, where violence can erupt at any moment, over drugs, money ... and love... but also where the samba beat rocks til dawn, where the women are the most beautiful on earth, and where one young man wants to escape his background and become a photographer.

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Based on a true story, this is a sprawling, magnificently told epic about the history of gang life in Rio's favelas. The original novel of the hugely acclaimed film.

Paulo Lins was born in Rio de Janeiro and at age seven moved to the 'City of God' housing project. He escaped the cycle of violence there to become an internationally celebrated writer, and still lives in Rio. This novel is the result of extended research in the housing project where Lins was raised. He spent eight years interviewing people and researching the drug trafficking and gang warfare that marked the history of the neighbourhood in the 1970s and 80s.

Alison Entrekin is an award-winning Australian literary translator from the Portuguese. She has translated many of Brazil’s most beloved and iconic literary works, including Clarice Lispector’s 1943 debut novel Near to the Wild Heart, the favela classic City of God by Paulo Lins and José Mauro de Vasconcelos’s My Sweet Orange Tree.

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In 2019 she was awarded the New South Wales Premier’s Translation Prize and PEN medallion and, in 2022, the AAWP Translator’s Prize. She has been an American Literary Translators Association Travel Fellow and a finalist in the PEN America Translation Prize, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, among others.

Praise for CITY OF GOD:

"City of God is an essential work within Brazil’s literature."

— Heloísa Buarque de Hollanda