Bruna Dantas Lobato: On Awakening to Language, Writing Slowly, How Quiet Books Can Be Momentous, and Her Debut Novel ‘Blue Light Hours’
Fall semester, nine years ago, I was enrolled in a writing workshop with an instructor I didn’t exactly see eye-to-eye with. Luckily, resisting someone’s limiting vision of how fiction works can sometimes be the spark of a friendship with someone else, someone whose vision is positively expansive. I met Bruna Dantas Lobato in that class, and we forged a bond as we bristled at the constraints of the workshop and encouraged what we saw in each other’s writing—even, and especially, when it departed from the dictates of traditional fiction writing to experiment with the elliptical, the spare, and the fragmentary.
We’ve kept in touch in the years since. The most recent time I saw her in person, in June 2023, Bruna came to see me in Amsterdam. We wandered through the city catching each other up on our lives, and she told me she was going on submission any day now with the novel she’d been patiently, carefully writing for as long as I’d known her. Telling the story of a Brazilian mother and daughter separated by the daughter’s decision to move to the U.S. to study, Blue Light Hours (Grove Atlantic, 2024) closely observes the bond they tenaciously maintain through video calls—not knowing when they’ll see each other again, not knowing how they’ll be changed by the experience as their days apart become months, and then years.
Within a few months of that conversation in Amsterdam, Bruna had not only sold her novel but also won the National Book Award for Translated Literature with Stênio Gardel, for her work translating his novel The Words That Remain. Needless to say, she is, as the New York Times so aptly puts it, “quite the literary star.” I sat down recently to talk with Bruna about translating her own book, the artistry of autobiographical fiction, and why having the perseverance to write slowly isn’t a bad thing.
Kate Doyle: You told me once that you learned English in part by reading American novels and short stories, to pass time at a job you had in Brazil—I’m trying to remember, at a pool?
Bruna Dantas Lobato: It was at a five star hotel! They had a pool and it was also a beachfront property.
KD: So your early cravings and ambitions to write—how connected were they to a specific language, to English versus Portuguese?
BDL: I’ve always wanted to be a writer, since I was a little kid. My parents didn’t go to college or finish high school—I didn’t know a single writer. But my mom would always give me these diaries. And I remember I would overhear her talking on the phone, and I loved writing down what she said and trying to guess what the person was saying on the other side.
KD: Oh, I love that.
BDL: I would imagine stories where my mom would do very adventurous things. She goes to work and then she fights with her boss! And my mom has kept all these little books that I would write. One was about this man who couldn’t find his shadow anymore, so he lost his sense of self. He felt kind of two-dimensional, and he kept trying to chase it, it was nowhere to be found—his shadow’s name was Elvis, for some reason!
I’m from a colonized country, my hometown was colonized three times. All in all, complicated relationships with languages in lots of places, but it meant that a lot of the things I read were in translation. In school, the Russian texts we read used bridge translation—Russian into French, and then from French into Portuguese. That tickled me. I was like, this is interesting and intriguing: texts are unstable. I wanted to be a translator, even as a teenager. Which was an absurd thing to want, because there’s no money and no professionalization in the traditional sense. I didn’t live in São Paulo or Rio, I lived really far into the tropics, right by the Equator in a small city. I had this five-star hotel job where I would be reading on my break, because a lot of the time I was just waiting around by the front desk.
So I had all this time to read and think, and I started learning English. All self-taught, just something I really wanted to do. It came from me, but I can’t emphasize this enough: it also came from the fact that if you wanted to be somebody in the world I grew up in, speaking English could help, it was currency. I knew it would benefit me working in a hotel, speaking English: I could one day be a manager. I fantasized about that. I didn’t know that I would apply for college abroad or that one day I would find myself in New York City—I’d never been anywhere.
I didn’t know I would be a writer in English until I was already doing it, pretty much. I kept thinking, am I going to have to choose one language? And that gave me a lot of anxiety: if I choose one I’m going to have one kind of life, and if I choose another, I’m going to have another, and I don’t even know if I have the power to choose to begin with. But then the choice was kind of made for me. Writing in English gave me this new way of thinking about writing. It defamiliarized language. It made me aware of the strangeness of language and expressions and idioms: all languages are so strange, and they all have such unique constraints. So that was kind of my awakening to language.
KD: You wrote Blue Light Hours in English, and then you wrote its translation for the Brazilian publisher. What was that like?
BDL: The longer I stayed in the United States, the less I wrote in Portuguese. I felt there was a loss there. I never got to figure out if I could write in Portuguese, and translating it felt like an interesting opportunity to have this homecoming of sorts. It was incredibly daunting and scary at first. I don’t have a voice as a writer in Portuguese, I don’t have a sense of self the way I have in English, because I simply haven’t had the experience. In my panic, I was like, okay, I’m going to go back to the basics. I’m going to have to triangulate my voice in English somehow. Here’s Jamaica Kincaid, here’s Jenny Offill, here’s Sigrid Nunez. Here are my touchstones, here also are my Brazilian influences. And then I read them in Portuguese. How does Jenny Offill sound in Portuguese? Let me look at Dept. of Speculation. Let me see Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid, Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au. And then I went into practice mode. The first couple pages, the rhythm wasn’t quite right, but once I fell into some kind of pace, I was like, oh, my sense of humor is back, and I know how to be lyrical. I knew how to be again.
KD: I underlined the moment where the daughter is keeping a notebook of her experiences, and she’s dissatisfied: she says it’s “both too insufficient and too exhaustive.” It made me think about your work as the inverse of that: it’s using the small and the quiet to speak to great emotion and great depth of feeling. But I think the publishing industry can be resistant to that sort of book.
BDL: It was one of my big fears working on this. I kept thinking other people will think this is not a novel, because it’s not a huge tome where characters go through great despair and big emotions—but what kind of immigrant novels then get to be written, if I force these immigrant characters to fit into this particular kind of shape? It felt wrong honestly, and not truthful to my experience, to have them go through some major saga when so much of what happens is very internal. How can I talk about simmering grief or a continuous sense of loss, loss that keeps on happening every single day?
I got really lucky that I have an agent, Sarah Bowlin, who signed with me knowing what kind of writer I was already, and she was on board. And she is very vocal about “quiet” books not being all that quiet. How not-useful it is to think about books that “have plot” versus books that are very subdued or understated. So-called “quiet books” can actually be quite explosive and momentous, in their own way.
KD: You and I have commiserated about the fact that we write slowly. I think there’s an idea in the culture of the writer as this person who sits in the chair no matter what for this many hours producing this many words. But I remember you from very early on being clear with people that that wasn’t how you worked at all.
BDL: It’s interesting to think that that’s what I projected, because I very much didn’t know. I had an inkling, but I was also just overwhelmed and confused. Professors would tell me all kinds of things as fact. You can’t be a writer if you don’t put in these particular kinds of work days or these particular hours. And then I would go home and I would despair a little. Maybe sometimes I would come back with a rebelliousness, but not without agonizing over it. I worried that maybe I would never be able to write anything substantial because I wrote in such small increments. I would sit with one sentence for weeks at a time, just thinking about that one sentence. To me, that felt like enough—that felt like the labor that I wanted to do.
KD: I still sometimes feel I’m fighting the part of me that internalized I wasn’t a writer if I wasn’t doing in a certain way. I can still feel shame about going slowly.
BDL: While I was working on this book I felt a lot of shame, because it felt like everyone knew—I wouldn’t shut up about it!—everyone knew I had been working on it for nearly ten years, and that it was still very small. Sometimes I didn’t touch it for six months at a time. I would get so anxious, my heart would be leaping out of my chest when I tried to open the file. The book started out as a place where I felt really safe, but then it became also this place that’s like, is this a compilation of my failures?
At one point it did become that—and I did have to find ways to climb out of it. My favorite way was going offline for a few days. Just sitting with a book and with my journal, and a few days in, I’d be like, oh, I remember: that’s who I am. Look how fun it is, look how much I enjoy it. Being really alone helped me center myself and have a sense of my own direction, my own purpose. I remember I did a DIY residency at a hermitage where there were a bunch of monks on silent retreats. I would stare at the river. Sometimes I would see a boat, but that was pretty much it. There was something about being there that made me think: there is book time, and then there is this other timeline, where I’m getting things done and doing the groceries and talking to friends. The time I need to be in the book, it needs to be extended, and kind of nectar-thick. But I forget about that all the time, because I’m constantly nervous about this or that, or worried about surviving or something. And that affects the writing a lot. But I love running away from the publishing industry. Going into hiding and protecting my writing time from other people’s prying eyes.
KD: That seems like something your characters are exploring too—the pleasures of solitude, and the pain of being alone.
BDL: Working on the first sections, I remember people telling me: Don’t you want to introduce other characters? Give her some friends and a boyfriend. And I remember making the decision that that was not what I wanted. Understanding, more or less, I think she’s meant to be a loner. In so many immigrant novels I loved, I hated the fact that what sustained the plot was the immigrant narrator falling in love. Their lives are interesting in their own right! It’s not because of a will-they-won’t-they. As much as I loved those books, I was also like, can I have a narrator who’s interesting not because of her love life? Can I give her none whatsoever?
I did understand that I was writing about being alone—and something about being the first person in your family to go to college. There’s a loneliness there that can’t be placated by having friends or by dating somebody, that’s not going to go away. That is such a big part of the book as well, how isolated she feels in that sense that she is an outsider. I know that: being the only one in the room. And I know that even if a lot of people in that room really love me, it doesn’t change the fact that I’m the only one.
KD: It feels to me, since I know you, that the book stands in an interesting relationship to your life. I think sometimes people talk about autobiographical fiction as if it’s a shortcut, or less imaginative—which is not how I feel at all.
BDL: People have been nervous to ask me if it’s autobiographical for that reason. But yes, it is autobiographical in so many ways, and also in so many ways not! That’s the oxymoron of autobiographical fiction. I think it’s wonderful that I have a character like me in the world, because I’ve never read one like me before, so I had to write her. I would have felt so significantly less lonely, if I had come across somebody like this on the page.
If you watched me in college, I’d just be sitting there, but I was feeling all these things: Will I ever see my mom again? What if I can’t afford to see her? How will this change me? Am I going to be unrecognizable to my parents? All of these feelings were there, but they didn’t look like anything, it was just me. That’s where the fiction part comes in: I need to turn these into things that are a little more active. Coming up with imagery, or coming up with actions or scenes that would show or externalize something I felt.
But the feelings do come from my life. I think if writers think that makes it less artistic, that makes me wonder what their life looks like. Because my life is very flat. My immigration case lasted fourteen years of bureaucracy. It was boring as hell, and stressful, and it didn’t feel like it had a climax. Even after I got the green card in the mail, it didn’t feel like I got a resolution, you know? My life doesn’t doesn’t feel like a plot in any way at all. I had to make life fit into some kind of container, my own version of plot.
KD: It’s strange to me, the assumption that there’s less artistry in autobiographical fiction. It makes me think of a boyfriend I had in high school who didn’t like 30 Rock because “Tina Fey seems like she’s just playing herself.”
BDL: The fact that she convinced him that she’s playing herself is a testament to the fact that she’s successfully tricked him. That is sheer art! We don’t know her, but she’s making us feel like we do. I’m always kind of amused when people assume that my character is a proper carbon copy of me. I’m like, I tricked you, didn’t I? You believed it.
KD: I wanted to ask if you had this structure for the novel from the beginning: first the daughter, then the mother, then their reunion?
BDL: It came at the last second, when I finally figured it out. And I was like, I won’t touch it, so it doesn’t fall apart. I slowly took a step back.
I had these chapters I wrote from the mother’s perspective as an exercise, but I resisted putting them into the book because I’d spent so many years working just with the daughter section. And I had written a reunion chapter as a one-off short story, like a palate cleanser. And my agent, Sarah, was like, try putting that in. Suddenly it was clear that’s what the book wanted to be. It really felt like that was, all along, what I was writing towards. My subconscious was planting the little seeds, but my conscious mind was really stubborn for some reason. And when I finally saw it clearly, I was like, obviously this ending is inevitable! I loved working on the last page, but it was the very last thing I actually wrote. That was the one time I was more or less chronological.
KD: I think, again, it’s a testament to taking your time. You could have pushed to write something faster, but it wouldn’t have been this book.
BDL: I had to live through that arc, to process all of the things that I was trying to write—and all the things that I didn’t want to write. I wrote so much that were not the concerns of this book. I wrote a lot more about class, and about not belonging, that didn’t make it into the book because it’s very narrowly focused, the novel. It makes me think a lot about how so many books can be really bloated.
KD: “Too insufficient and too exhaustive!”
BSL: Sometimes the more you talk, the more insufficient it is. You’re diluting it. So I liked the narrow focus, but I only accepted its narrow focus by spending a lot of time with it—understanding what’s really essential to me here.
KD: I think there are so many moments where the book skims the surface of class, or not belonging, where the reader can really feel the depth of what we’re on the surface of.
BDL: I’m glad it feels that way. I didn’t need to include, you know, this manifesto I wrote on class dynamics on college campuses. That informed the scene, but it doesn’t have to be in the scene. That felt like enough. I guess it also has to do with the fact that I don’t think I’m a “novel of ideas” writer—I am a feeler, sometimes more than a thinker.
KD: I wanted to ask you about the relationship between the mother and the daughter: it’s so complex, and yet there’s no resentment between them, even as everything they’ve had together is changing. The book is such a love letter.
BDL: It’s in many ways anti-dramatic to have these characters who are not confrontational—so many times I was told, just make them have a fight. But no, they won’t fight! I wanted my daughter character to figure out very early on that her mom had her own struggles, her own pains, and to look at her mom with that kind of softness. I wanted the mother and daughter’s relationship to be really insular so I could protect them from the other extraneous things that might make them bitter toward one another.
The first scene I wrote was just the two of them calling each other: they’re just talking on Skype and the daughter shows the mother what’s outside her window. I wrote that when I was still in college, back when I just thought, oh, I’m writing this piece of flash fiction. Even back then, I was like, I wonder if I can write something that’s sweet? Can I write a scene where they’re not fighting, where they miss and love each other very much, but they can’t get any closer? Can that make a narrative? And that was always the guiding premise of the book: it was about them trying to feel closer to one another, when there are things keeping them apart.
KD: What year was that, writing that first scene?
BDL: That was 2014.
KD: So it’s been 10 years. And you said that there have been periods where you didn’t want to look at the file, or you wondered whether it would even be a book. What kept you coming back to it?
BDL: I think the feeling that I knew what it was like to be an international student, and I knew so many other people who had gone through it—I wanted to write this for us, I wanted to have that in writing. I had that urge: I wish I could explain to everybody what it was like. And there was this other desire I wrote into the book, which is that the daughter really wanted to tell her mother. I wanted to tell my mom and tell people back home what on earth I was doing, and what it felt like to leave them. That I feel pain and I suffer because of it. To convey all of that loss.
It didn’t come out of ambition. It was more like, I better do it, because I want to resolve this feeling—and toward the end, because I am so tired of feeling sad, I’m done with revisiting this moment and sitting in this space, I want to close that off. I know that that’s impossible: I’m always going to feel all kinds of things about the fact that I up and left and I walked away, and now I live in another language and in another country. So I think it came from—not to be Freudian, but—it came from a psychic wound. Not that I thought that I could heal it, but just in the sense that I wanted other people to see where I was hurting.
KD: Did you get to do that, to tell your mother what it was like? Has she read the Portuguese version?
BDL: Yes and no: my mom hasn’t been able to see very well, so I read it out loud to her over WhatsApp video calls. Which is like—of course. That’s exactly what was supposed to happen! The book wanted to be written in Portuguese all along, so it could facilitate this.
It was an insane full circle moment. That was one moment that life did feel like fiction. She cried the entire time. I read it to her one chapter at a time. My sister’s crying in the corner as well. And then sometimes we’d have these insane moments of levity. I think she was flattered that I got to think so seriously about everything they said. That I didn’t forget the things that they were telling me: that I would use them in a story.
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Bruna Dantas Lobato is a fiction writer and translator. Her translation of The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel won the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature. Other translations have received the English PEN Translates Award and the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and have been longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, the PEN Translation Prize, and the Republic of Consciousness Prize.
Her debut novel, Blue Light Hours, was published in October 2024 by Grove Atlantic in North America, Companhia das Letras/PRH in Brazil (in her own translation), Dasan in South Korea, and İş Kültür in Turkey. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Guernica, A Public Space, and The Common, and has received support from MacDowell, Yaddo, Jentel, A Public Space, NYU, Disquiet International, and more.
Bruna holds an MFA in Fiction from New York University, an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa, and a BA in Literature from Bennington College. She has taught at NYU, Bennington College, Bread Loaf, the Center for Fiction, and Catapult, and is currently an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Grinnell College. Born and raised in Natal, Brazil, she lives in Iowa with her partner and pet bunny.
