Ruy Castro

Ruy Castro was born on February 26, 1948, in Caratinga, in inland Minas Gerais, but the city he adopted as subject and home is Rio de Janeiro. He started in journalism in 1967 and worked in newsrooms in Rio and São Paulo. Today he writes columns for Folha de S.Paulo four times a week.

His first big book came in 1990: Chega de Saudade, the story of bossa nova told from the backstage, the bars and the apartments where João Gilberto, Tom Jobim and friends changed Brazilian music. The recipe he used there became his trademark: huge research, hundreds of interviews and a light, columnist's style that reads like a novel.

That recipe produced the biographies that made his name. O Anjo Pornográfico (1992) tells the life of playwright Nelson Rodrigues. Estrela Solitária (1995) follows soccer star Garrincha from the pitch in Pau Grande to glory and decline. Carmen (2005) traces Carmen Miranda from Rio's Lapa district to Hollywood. The last two won him the Jabuti Prize.

Rio is his other great subject. Ela é Carioca (1999) is a fond encyclopedia of Ipanema, and Metrópole à Beira-Mar (2019) shows the city buzzing in the 1920s. He also wrote about samba-canção in A Noite do Meu Bem (2015) and tried historical fiction in Era no Tempo do Rei (2007) and Os Perigos do Imperador (2022), which won the Jabuti for Novel in 2023. Some books he co-wrote with writer Heloísa Seixas, his wife, such as Terramarear (2011).

His books have been published in the United States, England, Japan, Germany, Spain and several other countries. In 2021 he received the Brazilian Academy of Letters' Machado de Assis Prize for his body of work. The next year he was elected to Chair 13 of the Academy, succeeding Sérgio Paulo Rouanet, and took his seat in March 2023.

In 2025 he went back to bossa nova through Tom Jobim. O ouvidor do Brasil: 99 vezes Tom Jobim gathers nearly a hundred short pieces on the composer, with stories from 1950s and 60s music and his bond with the country. It won the Jabuti Book of the Year, the edition's top prize.