João Guimarães Rosa

Guimarães Rosa trained as a physician and practiced for years in the remote backlands of Minas Gerais, absorbing the sertão's speech and folklore that would later fill his fiction. He joined Brazil's diplomatic corps in the 1930s and served in Hamburg during the Second World War, using his position to help Jewish acquaintances obtain visas out of Nazi Germany before Brazil's entry into the war led to his own brief internment.

Later postings took him to Bogotá and Paris, and he continued writing between diplomatic duties, publishing The Devil to Pay in the Backlands in 1956 as one continuous monologue built from invented and archaic words drawn from rural Brazilian speech.

He died of a heart attack in Rio de Janeiro in 1967, three days after finally taking his seat in the Brazilian Academy of Letters, having delayed the induction for years out of stage fright.