Paulo Henriques Britto was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1951. His third collection of poems, Trovar Claro, received Brazil's equivalent of the National Book Award from the Biblioteca Nacional, and his fourth book, Macau, won Brazil's most prestigious award, the Portugal Telecom Prize. In 2005, he published his first short story collection, Paraisos artificiais. The Clean Shirt of It, a collection of Britto's poems, translated into English by Idra Novey, was released in July 2007 in the Lannan Translations Series from BOA Editions. Britto is also one of Brazil's principal translators of British and American literature, and received the National Library Foundation's prize for his 1995 translation of E. L. Doctorow's Waterworks. His other translations include works by Henry James, V. S. Naipaul, Thomas Pynchon, Wallace Stevens, and Elizabeth Bishop's poems about Brazil. He currently teaches at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro.