Luiza Sauma

Luiza Sauma is a critically acclaimed Brazilian-British novelist and journalist. Her fiction plays with genre and form, and examines memory, trauma, work and unstable identities. Her debut novel, Flesh and Bone and Water (Viking), is a story about family secrets, first love, class and race, set in Rio de Janeiro, the Amazon and London. Luiza’s second novel, Everything You Ever Wanted (Viking), follows a disillusioned young office worker who leaves Earth to join a reality TV show on another planet. It was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore award and recommended by Florence Welch’s book club, Between Two Books. Both novels have been translated into various other languages.

Before she became an author, Luiza spent several years as a journalist at the Independent on Sunday, and then worked in the art world. Her essays, reviews and short stories have been published in the Guardian, the Telegraph, the i, Five Dials, Elephant, Lighthouse and Un Nuevo Sol (the first major anthology of British Latinx writing). She has a Creative & Life Writing MA from Goldsmiths, where she won the Pat Kavanagh Award, and has taught creative writing to children and adults.

Luiza was born in Rio de Janeiro and moved to London with her family when she was a child. She now lives in east London with her husband and children, and is currently working on her third novel, which explores motherhood, work and art across three generations of Brazilian women.