Writing “Family” by Ana Paula Maia puts men in the center of the confinement

“ ANDu am a fictionalist”, says Maia in an interview with the agency Lusa, explaining that she does not know in advance where a story will take her and that, during the narrative construction, she incorporates the themes she finds along the way.

This willingness to follow the story is at the center of “So on Earth as Under the Earth”, a novel originally published in Brazil in 2017 and now edited in Portugal (Manuscript publisher), after the author was one of the six finalists of the International Booker Prize 2026.

The work follows the former assassin by contract Bronco Gil, whose nickname is Indian, in an agricultural penal colony, who is always thinking of fleeing for fear of death in prison. 

But the idea was born from another space of confinement: the slaughterhouse of “Board and men”, the writer’s previous book, where men and animals remain confined on different sides.

“ I said: ‘Ah, since I spoke about animal confinement, now I’m going to talk about men’s confinement’,” Maia told Lusa, explaining how she decided to deepen Bronco Gil’s history and his past in the prison system.

The confinement, however, is not limited to prisons in the writer’s literature, which sees the whole humanity “presiding in confinement spaces” by identifying borders, neighborhoods and territories as spaces bounded by lines that are often only imaginary.

“Who delimits these spaces?” he asks, by reflecting on borders between countries and on how human beings establish zones of belonging, exclusion and circulation.

This vision was also born from a look developed since childhood, when he realized that reality was not limited to the place where he lived, in Nova Iguaçu, Rio de Janeiro. 

“ Today, walking around the world, I see that the world is peripheral”, he said, describing cities and parishes where organized areas can take place, as it advances, to more precarious and violent spaces.

It is also in this view that the “regions of the country”, an expression used by the writer herself in the interview to designate precarious regions in the interior of Brazil that feed her research and literature.

To write “Just on Earth as Under the Earth,” Maia says she read newspapers from the interior of Pará, Mato Grosso do Sul and other regions, as well as testimonies from judges, jailers and police officers, university essays and reports of death in the prison system.

The research also led her to Franz Kafka, whose novel “In the penal colony” reread before writing, and to the aesthetics of Sergio Leone’s ‘westerns’, one of his cinematic passions.

“I really like western,” explains the author, who led to the novel an atmosphere of dusty men, arms around the waist, own laws and characters forced to resolve conflicts within that territory.

The novel also goes through the history of violence against enslaved people and indigenous people, a theme that, according to Ana Paula Maia, emerged during the construction of the narrative itself, when the research made her stumble into these events.

The writer does not, however, consider this to be a theme of all her production, but a specific issue of this novel, in which the past and the present end up.

It is precisely from this relationship that the title “Just on Earth as Under the Earth” is born, in a reference that touches the prayer of the Our Father (“just on earth as in heaven”), but that arose from the narrative itself.

The author explains that what happens in the penal colony in the present had already happened in that same place about a century and a half or two centuries before, in a historical repetition that links what is “on earth” to what is “under the earth”.

Violence, by the way, is one of the central elements of the writer’s vision, which considers her to be “inherent to the human being” and “latent”, capable of appearing in different places and social strata.

“I think my literature is a social terror,” he says, for considering that terror is not necessarily in supernatural monsters or events, but in its own routine and in human relations.

Men occupy a privileged place in this universe: Maia says she only writes about male characters and that all her protagonists are connected to a profession.

They are workers such as police, firemen, garbage workers, gravers, body preparers, taxidermists and men who collect dead animals on the roads, as well as workers who slaughter animals, break asphalt or clean sewer boxes.

“ Usually my literature is linked to professions”, explains the author, who shows particular interest in hard, unhealthy and little visible works.

In “So on Earth as Under the Earth”, one of the central characters of this theme of the craft is Melquíades, the maximum authority on site, who hunts prisoners and treats them with violence.

The author says that her literature does not seek to make value judgments about the characters or situations it portrays, but to put different perspectives within the same narrative, allowing the reader to follow the characters' point of view.

“ I think my story is more of questioning than of understanding”, says the writer, who prefers to gather these different characters in the same space and, from there, build the narrative without determining to the reader what is right or wrong.

Concision is also a mark of this writing, deliberately constructed by the author, after the first books, when she realized that her own verbsity bothered her and began to look for more economical texts.

In love with the seventh art, she admits that cinema may have contributed to this choice, due to the need to conduct a narrative directly to the point.

Family orality was another influence: Maia grew up hearing stories of adults and reports of swidden, as well as observing workers and neighbors of a reality different from that lived within her own home.

“That’s why in my house there was a lot of narrative orality,” he says, relating this interaction with the stories he heard since childhood to his connection with the swidden and the way he builds narratives.

Cinema and television were also fundamental in the formation of the writer, who from early on consumed films and made relations between close and distant worlds, feeding the look that today leads to fiction.

At the age of five, he began studying ballet and also took piano lessons, experiences that were part of the education received during childhood and that later abandoned, although he returned to the piano as an adult.

In his teens, there was also a punk rock band, in which he played drums, but rejects the idea of being considered a musician, defining in the interview that experience as a brief “hobby hobby of the hobby”, he described laughing.

It was with this repertoire of cinema, television, orality, music and world observation that Ana Paula Maia built a literature that now arrives in Portugal.

“ I think this book arrives in Portugal at a time that I think is right”, says Ana Paula Maia, who had never published in the country, except for a short story in an anthology several years ago.

For her, the Portuguese reader can find in the novel “another arm” of Brazilian literature, different from paths already known and closer to the “banks” that feed her fiction.

Happy, the author also naturally views the international path of a work published nine years ago, remembering that “the literature is timeless” and that a book can find its moment long after it is written.

“ I’m still glad that I’m able to enjoy this years later,” says Brazil’s multi-appreciated writer when she recalls that she has her books published in several countries, including Germany, Spain, the United States, France and Italy.

Ana Paula Maia has been 48 years old, writes for 23, and currently prepares her 10th book with ways to be published also in Portugal, without taking from focus men in confinement spaces and the concision of writing the horizon of her literature.

“I really like a concise text and I like to read concise stories too. It is a direct thing to the point ", observed.