João Paulo Cuenca was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1978.

 

In 2012, he was selected by the British magazine Granta as one of the best 20 young brazilian novelists and in 2007 he was selected by the Hay Festival as one of the 39 most important latin-american young writers. In the last four years he has increasingly worked with TV, video and theather. “The death of J.P. Cuenca” will be his first feature film.

 

He is the author of novels such as “Present Body”(2003), “The Mastroianni Day” (2007), and “The only happy ending for a love story is an accident” (2010). His novels had its rights sold to Portugal, Italy, Spain, Germany, France and the US. Between 2003 and 2010, he wrote weekly chronicles for newspapers such as Tribuna da Imprensa, Jornal do Brasil, and O Globo, some of which were collected and published in his book “The last dawn” (2012).

 

He was the head writer of the TV Globo channel series called “After all, what do women want?” (2010) (First chapter here), as well as of a theater play called “Terror” (2011), performed in Brasília and in Rio de Janeiro. He was the co-writer/director of “Fragments” (2011), a free adaptation of the work of Roland Barthes staged in two major theathers of Rio de Janeiro. In 2012, Cuenca directed, wrote and acted in the film series “I’ve nothing of my own”, a blend of travel book and fiction result of a 50 day trip thought the Asian southeast along with the Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gonçalves Mendes and the novelist Tatiana Salem Levy, which is being aired on Canal Brasil cable channel on 20 episodes of 10 minutes. (Episodes now online here). He has been working as literature, film and music critic on Globonews network television in Brazil and as international correspondent with live appearances from Lisbon, Madrid, Berlin, Amsterdam and NY.

 

He did lectures as a guest writer in Heidelberg University (2012), Salzburg University (2012), Princeton University (2011), Columbia University (2011), Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris III (2006), UFSC, Florianópolis Brazil (2008), UFRN, Natal, Brazil (2008), PUC-Rio (2004), UFRJ (2004), among many others. He has a graduation in Economic Science (UFRJ – Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, 1996-2002).