Dalton Trevisan

Dalton Jérson Trevisan (Curitiba, 14 June 1925) is a Brazilian author of short stories.

He is described as an "acclaimed short-story chronicler of lower-class mores and popular dramas."

Dalton Trevisan was the editor of a magazine called Joaquim (Portuguese: Revista Joaquim), which put Paraná on the map of Brazilian literary discussions in the 1940s.

The magazine had a total of 21 issues and circulated between April 1946 and December 1948.

Joaquim was responsible for the first publication in Portuguese of texts by T. S. Eliot, Franz Kafka, Louis Aragon, Tristan Tzara, Garcia Lorca, Rainer Maria Rilke, André Gide and Jean Paul Sartre.

Among the sporadic contributors to the magazine it is possible to list Vinícius de Moraes, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Mario de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade and Antônio Cândido.

The name "Joaquim" was chosen as a common, proximate and universal name in Brazil.

Joaquim 's pages displayed original artwork by plastic artists such as Candido Portinari, Di Cavalcanti, Guido Viaro and Poty Lazzarotto.

Lazzarotto would remain a great editorial partner of Trevisan in the following decades.

Trevisan won the 2012 Prémio Camões, the leading Portuguese-language author prize, valued at 100,000 EUR.

His short stories are inspired in the daily life of his home city of Curitiba, though featuring characters and situations of universal meaning.

His extremely concise and refined tales have been called "Haikus in prose".

They are often based on dialogue, using a popular language, and underline the torturing and absurd aspects of everyday life.

Often brutal, his narratives can be considered the reverse of moral tales, exposing a culture of perversion and violence underlying middle class hypocrisy.

As of 2021, only two of his books have been translated into English, Novels Not at All Exemplary and The Vampire of Curitiba, both in 1972 by translator Gregory Rabassa.

His reclusive behavior, added to his longevity and the content of his work, gave him the nickname "The Vampire of Curitiba".

He graduated from the Federal University of Paraná in legal studies but seldom worked in the law profession.