Igor Alcantara

Igor Alcantara was born on 7 May 1977 in Janaúba, a small town in Minas Gerais, Brazil. He moved to Brasília as a boy and spent most of his Brazilian life there, having lived in or passed through nearly every state in the country. He has lived in the United States since 2014.

He became a compulsive reader mostly by accident. School ran in the morning, home was far away, and there was no way back until evening, so his afternoons belonged to a public library in Brasília. Give a nine year old that many empty hours and a library card and he ends up somewhere unusual. Oscar Wilde at ten, Homer and Dante at eleven, and by twelve the complete plays of Shakespeare along with a good part of Kafka, Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis, who are still the three he goes back to.

His first short story, "A Flor de Moscou," was written when he was eleven. He has not stopped writing since. Much of what he produced in those years is gone, some of it lost to time, some of it written as a gift for a friend and handed over without keeping a copy.

He believes a writer should keep stepping onto ground he has not walked before, which is why no two of his books are much alike. Comfort is a fine place to live and a poor place to work.

He published nothing until he was past thirty, when printing technology finally turned an old plan into an affordable one. Several of those books went on to win prizes in literary competitions, which was the first sign that anyone outside the room was listening. His novels are Trinta e Três, Hendecagon and Mutuwa.

Today he is Director of Data Science and Education at IPC Global, and he writes and podcasts about data and artificial intelligence at Data Voyagers in English and Intervalo de Confiança in Portuguese. His first book of nonfiction, The Handprint and the Algorithm: From the Cave Wall to the Machine Mind, came out in September 2026 in both English and Portuguese. It took him close to three years, because he likes writing more than he likes having written.

He lives in Alpharetta, Georgia, with his family.