Tony Bellotto

Antonio Carlos Liberalli Bellotto was born in São Paulo on June 30, 1960, the son of a historian and an archival studies scholar. Books were never in short supply at home. But his first stage was music: he has been in Titãs since the band formed in the early 1980s and is one of three members still in a group that once had nine. With his bandmates he co-wrote hits such as Sonífera Ilha, Polícia, Flores and O Pulso.

His literary debut came in 1995 with Bellini e a Esfinge. The hero is Remo Bellini, a blues-loving São Paulo detective who keeps landing in crooked cases around the city. The character returned in Bellini e o Demônio (1997), Bellini e os Espíritos (2005) and Bellini e o Labirinto (2014).

Bellini reached the screen twice. Bellini e a Esfinge (2001), directed by Roberto Santucci, stars Fábio Assunção as the detective with Malu Mader in the cast, and won the audience award at the Rio Film Festival. Bellini e o Demônio, by Marcelo Galvão and again starring Fábio Assunção, screened at the Rio festival in 2009 and hit theaters in 2011.

Outside the series he has ranged widely. BR 163: Duas Histórias na Estrada (2001), O Livro do Guitarrista (2001) and Os Insones (2007) came out outside the series, and then came No Buraco (2010), Lô (2018) and Dom (2020), his tenth novel. On TV he hosted Afinando a Língua on Canal Futura from 1999 to 2016. He has been married since 1989 to actress Malu Mader.

His 11th book, Vento em setembro, came out in 2024 from Companhia das Letras. The setup: a young man vanishes at a party in 1970s Assis, and decades later a journalist in Ouro Preto gets pulled into a story tied to that disappearance. In October 2025 it won the Jabuti Prize for Literary Novel, a milestone in the guitarist's writing career.