I’ve been passionate about words since I taught myself how to read at the age of three. Luckily for the logophile-me, I’m also a Brazilian, born and raised—and my mother tongue has licked me so hard that, as a faithful daughter, I can’t help but praise Brazilian Portuguese whenever I can.
How would I not? First off, we routinely use terms like fazer cafuné (the act of fondly caressing someone’s hair), xodó (an expression of endearment you can use to refer to a person or a thing you care about, like a child, a pet, or a beloved book) and matar a saudade (to “kill” the longing you feel of someone or something). One of the biggest classics of our literature, Grande Sertão: Veredas, by João Guimarães Rosa, has sentences like “O diabo na rua, no meio do redemoinho”—which means, word by word, “The devil on the street, in the middle of the whirlwind,” but is untranslatable because demo is a synonym of devil, and it is…*sighs in delight* literally written in the middle of the word redemoinho. Not to mention we have Pajubá—a dialect created by travestis who, sheltered by Afro-Brazilian religions during our dismal years as a military dictatorship, devised this secret vocabulary loaded with West African words so members of the early queer community of Brazil could avoid being understood, and thus protect themselves from police repression; nowadays, many terms of Pajubá are pretty much alive thanks to the internet and even mainstream slang.
Back to me, life happened, and I (surprisingly?) ended up becoming a writer, and later a translator—from English and Spanish into Portuguese. I’ve published short stories, novelettes, and novellas all over the Brazilian market, and currently have three forthcoming novels; I’ve also translated more than 170 pieces, including important books by renowned authors; and, for years, I talked about language on my social media, to a rather expressive audience, most of the time celebrating Brazilian Portuguese and how blessed I am for being able to express myself every day in this linguistic beauty. It has never been a secret how fond of my native tongue I am.
So, when I started writing fiction in English—a language in which I had little to no formal education, and in which I wasn’t fluent until I was in my twenties—many friends and acquaintances got really confused. Today I’m an alumnus of Clarion West, I have many stories published in anglophone SF/F magazines and collections, and one of my translated pieces even won a BSFA Award, but people—mainly other Brazilians—keep asking me all the time: “Why do you write in English?”
In the beginning, I went for the reasonable answer: I want more people to read my stories. In Brazil, we have a significantly smaller number of SF/F readers in comparison to the anglophone community, so it makes sense, right? There’s also the financial aspect, of course. With the current exchange rate from dollar to real, selling a single 5000-word short story to a pro-rate magazine pays a Brazilian twice the monthly amount received by someone who earns a minimum wage working forty hours a week.
But the truth is, I write in English because I want to. And mostly because I can. Also, I’m somehow good at it.
It took me a while to admit it to myself, mainly because it sounds rather immodest: So, you have at your disposal an amazing language you love and were born into, and you also have a market that already publishes your work in your country, but you decided to write fiction in a language you’ve learned as an adult mainly because you want to prove—to yourself and to the world—you can do it, and you can do it right, and you can do it so right you’re selling stories for extremely competitive magazines in a context where most of the other writers fighting for the few publication slots have English as their first language?
It still sounds immodest as I write this, actually—but am I that wrong in my immodesty?
The biggest game changer in my way of thinking about this was Fantástico Guia, a project in which my partner Diogo Ramos and I support and encourage speculative fiction authors to write and submit their work in English. Our activities are not fully focused on that, so many people join our community for other reasons, without having ever contemplated the possibility of writing in another language. And as much as they are enticed by the money they can earn, and by the idea of reaching broader audiences, nothing makes our fellow writers more interested in testing the waters of the anglophone market than hearing Diogo and I say they should write in English just because they can. Some students start translating their stories from Portuguese into English—it feels safer in the beginning, and it helps build up confidence, experience, and familiarity with their prose. Most people, though, tend to abandon this practice as soon as they realize writing in English from scratch helps to avoid pitfalls like using false friends, untranslatable idioms, and structures that are too unnatural.
It would be irresponsible of us to tell our students it’s always rainbows and butterflies. We’ve experienced firsthand the disadvantages of being writers from the Global South trying to enter the SF/F anglophone market. In terms of language, there’s the way our English reads; regardless how fluent we are and how hard we try not to emulate linguistic structures from our mother tongue, our writing will always end up reading at least a little off for a native speaker—ask Sapir and Whorf and they will explain it better than me how our brain is wired in a specific way according to the structure of the language we’re raised in. Our style of telling stories can be also a problem; as South Americans, well-versed both in magical realism literature and the day-to-day belief in the supernatural, we tend to throw in speculative elements and let it be, versus the anglophone urge of categorizing, naming, and explaining every magical aspect of a narrative. Both characteristics are supposedly good things, as more and more magazines are actively interested in publishing stories from diverse voices and perspectives—but in reality, there are so many barriers aside from the language one that most of the time we’re not on equal footing with native English speakers.
And I didn’t even start talking about how we have to learn from scratch how to navigate a market that is not only huge when compared to ours, but also has its snares and own conventions.
In the end, though, it pays off. Most of our students are in their first dozen submissions and haven’t sold a story written in English yet—something anyone should expect, as the SF/F magazines environment is a very competitive one. But at each hold, at each personal rejection, they understand we also belong. They understand we’re pretty brave, actually—writing is already hard and submitting is already scary when you’re doing it from your comfort zone, let alone when you’re totally out of it regarding your main writing tool: your language. It also helps a lot to be able to look up to many authors who don’t have English as their first language, but are incredibly talented and successful in the anglophone SF/F world—such as Greek Eugenia Triantafyllou (who has won a Shirley Jackson Award and a British Fantasy Award and been nominated for the Ignyte, Locus, Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards), francophone Aliette de Bodard (who has won three Nebula Awards, an Ignyte Award, a Locus Award, a European Science Fiction Society award, a British Fantasy Award, and six BSFA Awards), and my very dear amigo Renan Bernardo (who has been nominated for the Ignyte and Locus Awards—and assembled, in exchange for sushi, the very computer on which I’m writing this essay).
Meanwhile, I keep writing and publishing in Portuguese, of course. The Brazilian market may be smaller, and pay much less, but I know my prose will never sound so mine in any other language than my beautiful mother tongue. But, whenever possible, I make sure to say I write in English mostly because I can. It’s the truth; it’s something to be proud of—and it’s also a way to make a point.
© 2026 Jana Bianchi
