Milton Hatoum (Manaus, 1952) is a writer, essayist and translator. He was a professor of French Literature at the University of Amazonas and a visiting professor at the University of California (Berkeley). His first novel, A Tale of a Certain Orient (Bloomsbury U.K.), received the Jabuti best novel of the year award, the most prestigious prize for fiction in Brazil, in 1990. It was published in the U.S., U.K., and five other countries. His second novel, The Brothers (Bloomsbury U.K., and Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the U.S.) received the Jabuti prize in 2001 and was published in ten countries. He was a writer in residence at Yale University, UC Berkeley and Stanford University. His third novel, Cinzas do Norte, is to be published by Bloomsbury as The Ashes of the Amazon. It came out in Brazil in 2005 and was awarded the Grande Prémio da Crítica. He is writing a novella on an Amazonian myth for a series to be published by Canongate.