Manoel Carlos Karam

Manoel Carlos Karam was born in southern Brazil in 1947. He spent most of his life in the city of Curitiba, where he graduated from journalism school, worked in the media, advised political campaigns, and founded a theater company that revolutionized experimental theater in the state. Karam wrote twenty plays and seven books, and won the Cruz e Souza Literature Prize in 1995. He was known—though never at the large scale his work deserved—for his experimental writing style, often compared to Kafka, Monty Python, and Vonnegut. He died in December 2007, and his extensive book collection and private documents were purchased by the city and placed in the Manoel Carlos Karam Reading House, a refurbished house-turned-library open to the public. In 2012, the State of Paraná created a yearly fiction prize in his honor.