About

He was born in Salvador, Brazil, in 1990, and published his first book, Sonhos e outros sonos, at fifteen. In secondary school he founded the school newspaper Bula! with classmates and took part in creating and running the school radio, and the interview he conducted for the paper with Senator Cristovam Buarque won, in 2007, first place in the Interview category of the Jornalista do Futuro (Journalist of the Future) competition of the Bahia Press Association.

Between 2012 and 2017, under the name Danilo Augusto, he published poems, essays and translations in journals such as escamandro, Germina, Modo de Usar & co. and Jornal Relevo, was a finalist for the Sesc Carlos Drummond de Andrade Poetry Prize and took third place in the First Latin American University Literature Competition, both in 2012, and brought out Poemas (2013, remade by hand in 2014) and Zumbi (2014). Estar na Grama (Patuá, 2024), with a preface by Guilherme Gontijo Flores, is the first book signed Danilo de Athayde. In 2026 he published at noemafagos.com the digital poetry work Noemáfagos, twenty-one interactive poems written as a pair with the thesis, which he is also preparing as a book, as he is the Glossário Poético da Cosmologia (Poetic Glossary of Cosmology), in which definition, poem and scientific gloss meet in the same entry.

A graduate of the Interdisciplinary Bachelor’s in Humanities at the Federal University of Bahia and of a degree in Letters, he has researched the tradition of the Machine of the World since 2014, the subject of his first talks in Salvador and now of the thesis O nome de tudo (The Name of Everything), under a cotutelle between the University of Porto and the Federal University of Minas Gerais. He has published articles in Nuntius Antiquus, Philia and Rebeca, has an article accepted by the Luso-Brazilian Review, and has presented work in Porto, London and São Paulo, where in 2026 he spoke at Ratio Ethica, the conference of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts.

He is an editor of Em Tese, the journal of the Graduate Programme in Literary Studies at UFMG, for which he is organizing the special issue “De Dante aos buracos negros” (From Dante to Black Holes), an ad hoc reviewer for seven journals and a member of the Brazilian Comparative Literature Association. He has taught at Universidade Salvador and at the Federal Institute of Bahia. Selected in 2026 by the Portugal–Berkeley Program of the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), he has a research visit to the University of California, Berkeley, planned for 2027.

He writes on film for Bright Lights Film Journal and has translated, among others, William Blake, John Keats, Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens and poets of the Tang dynasty by way of William Carlos Williams’s versions.