# Drauzio Varella is elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters

At 83, the oncologist who became the country's best-known doctor and the author of Estação Carandiru takes chair 32, which belonged to Zuenir Ventura.

- Section: Arts & Culture
- Published: November 13, 2026
- Address: https://ceoone.com.br/en/article/drauzio-varella-is-elected-to-the-brazilian-academy-of-letters
- Em português: https://ceoone.com.br/artigo/drauzio-varella-e-eleito-para-a-academia-brasileira-de-letras.md

![Portrait of Drauzio Varella in a light blue shirt, looking at the camera](https://pub-b80e49b2737940b3ab5d3f20d0578192.r2.dev/artigos/drauzio-varella-e-eleito-para-a-academia-brasileira-de-letras-foto-horizontal.webp)

Photo: Léo Ramos Chaves/Revista Pesquisa FAPESP

## Key points

- Drauzio Varella, 83, was elected to chair 32 of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, formerly held by Zuenir Ventura, with 29 votes.
- A pioneering oncologist in cancer and AIDS research, he became Brazil's best-known doctor and wants to contribute to the ABL in communication, education and health.
- The author of 20 books is best known for Estação Carandiru (1999), a Jabuti Prize winner that became a Hector Babenco film in 2003.

The Brazilian Academy of Letters announced on Thursday, November 12, the election of physician and writer Drauzio Varella to chair number 32, previously held by journalist Zuenir Ventura, who died in September. In a vote held that afternoon at the ABL headquarters in Rio de Janeiro, Drauzio received 29 votes; Sérgio Fonta, the runner-up, received 8.

The news reached him with the calm of someone who never sought it. "I write for pleasure. I never placed myself in the world of literature," he told Estadão by phone, minutes after the announcement. The first time someone suggested he join the Academy, about ten years ago, he felt it was not for him: the world of literature, he thought, belonged to those who had devoted their whole lives to it. "But things worked out this way, and here it is. You cannot fight destiny."

What drives him now is what he can contribute to the house of Machado de Assis. Drauzio wants to bring to the Petit Trianon what he has learned on three fronts: communication, education and health.

## The doctor who listens

Over decades devoted to oncology, Drauzio Varella took on a commitment that defines his work: not letting grim prognoses poison the time his patients had left. The mission demanded a delicate balance between empathy and the ability not to be paralysed by the suffering of others. That readiness to listen to and observe other people also became a form of expression.

His arrival at the ABL crowns a body of work that was never an escape from medicine, the path taken by so many doctors who ventured into writing. What sets this much-loved author apart is precisely the way he turns professional experience into widely read books, written in simple, accessible language. His is the writing of a chronicler with a social eye: like someone continuing a conversation begun in the consulting room or in the corridors of a prison, never judging, attentive to small gestures and, above all, to the humanity of his characters.

The habit dates back to childhood. Born during the Second World War, Drauzio grew up in Brás, then a neighbourhood of immigrants from small villages in Italy, Portugal and Spain who had come to São Paulo looking for work. The factory whistle set the rhythm of the place, and the boy spent hours listening to the adults talk. He lost his mother at 4 and, still a child, decided he would be a doctor. At 18 he was at the University of São Paulo Medical School, and soon he was gaining prestige, and good pay, teaching at the Objetivo college prep course.

![Drauzio Varella, in a light shirt, speaks to the camera in a room with a yellow staircase behind him](https://pub-b80e49b2737940b3ab5d3f20d0578192.r2.dev/artigos/drauzio-varella-e-eleito-para-a-academia-brasileira-de-letras-retrato.webp)

Drauzio Varella in a recording for UN Brazil, in 2023. Photo: ONU Brasil/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

## From television to social media

A pioneer in studies of cancer and the AIDS virus, Drauzio took medicine beyond the consulting room at a time when a doctor speaking on radio or television was frowned upon by colleagues. He insisted on talking to the public anyway and, over the decades, became the most famous doctor in Brazil. His slender, affable figure won over the country through the health segments he has presented for years on Globo's Fantástico, and later reached the digital world, with a YouTube channel, a website and profiles on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

## The books

Alongside all this, he has published 20 books, most of them with Companhia das Letras. His greatest success, Estação Carandiru (1999), portrays daily life and violence in what was the country's largest prison, where he worked as a volunteer doctor for a decade, and addresses the massacre of October 2, 1992, when a Military Police operation to put down a riot left 111 inmates dead. The book won the Jabuti Prize and, in 2003, became a film by Hector Babenco, a friend of the author since 1984, starring Rodrigo Santoro and Gero Camilo. It also inspired the play Salmo 91, by Dib Carneiro Neto.

"Until we convince ourselves that we have to distribute income, wanting to walk the streets in peace without anything happening will be just a dream," he told Estadão in 2025. A critic of the police action at Carandiru, he maintains that filling the jails does not reduce urban violence.

In Carcereiros (2012), he shifted his gaze from the inmates to the prison guards, who worked in harsh conditions and risked their lives. The book was adapted by Globo into a series and a feature film starring Rodrigo Lombardi. With Prisioneiras (2017), he completed his trilogy on the prison system, gathering what he saw as a volunteer doctor in a women's prison, with stories of inmates who often turned to crime because of their partners and ended up forgotten.

In O Médico Doente (2007), he reversed the roles and became a character in his own story: his account of the yellow fever he caught on a trip to the Amazon, which nearly killed him, inspired the German writer Carmen Stephan to write Malaria: A Novel, narrated by the mosquito that transmits it. His most recent work, O Sentido das Águas: Histórias do Rio Negro (2025), grew out of three decades of travel in the Amazon region, where Drauzio runs a bioprospecting project studying plants to fight disease. "I arrived in the Amazon completely ignorant. And most people who live in the south of the country are ignorant about the Amazon," he said at the time of its release.

## The meaning of life

Early in his career, Drauzio, an atheist, imagined that observing how patients faced death would help him understand the meaning of life. Over time, he realised how naive the idea was. In Por um Fio (2004), a memoir of patients and families facing the end, including the story of his brother Fernando, who died of cancer in 1991, he wrote: "Imagining death as a burden about to collapse onto our destiny is unbearable."

Living alongside mortality had at least one effect on his personality: it took away his fear of death. And without that fear, the man who devoted his life to keeping death away from others has himself become an immortal.

## Sources and editorial notes

- Based on information from O Estado de S. Paulo, A Fundo section, pages C10 and C11, report by Gabriel Zorzetto, November 13, 2026.

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