About Alex
I grew up in Brazil wanting to read, but books were difficult to come by. The public schools I attended didn’t have libraries, and buying books was simply beyond what my parents could afford for me or my siblings.
Every once in a while, my sister would bring home a book borrowed from one of her friends. I would sometimes pick it up and have a look, but most of those books were either not meant for my age or weren’t the kinds of stories that interested me. Books were something I heard people talk about far more often than something I actually had in my hands.
That changed when I reached college.
For the first time, I began discovering some of the major names in Brazilian and world literature. What had once seemed distant became part of my everyday life. I graduated from a state university with a degree in Portuguese, English, and Literature and began my career as a teacher, working with middle- and high-school students.
At twenty-seven, I moved to the United States and found myself immersed in another language and culture. My life began moving in directions I could never have predicted while I was at university. I worked a variety of jobs and eventually returned to the classroom for a time, teaching elementary school in Massachusetts.
Later, my path changed again.
I moved to Canada in 2008 and eventually began operating heavy equipment, working in Alberta and British Columbia. Excavators, loaders, dozers, construction sites, long shifts, and the people who make their living around those machines became part of my world.
It was a long way from studying literature and teaching languages, but those different parts of my life were never as disconnected as they might appear.
I started writing about twenty years before publishing my first novel. For a long time, I would begin stories without finishing them. Life moved on, new ideas replaced old ones, and writing remained something I kept returning to.
About five years ago, that changed. I began finishing the stories I started.
Eventually, I realized that writing them wasn’t enough. It was time to let other people read them.
My fiction draws from many of the worlds I’ve passed through: different countries, languages and cultures; classrooms and construction sites; ordinary people placed in extraordinary situations. Sometimes the most useful experience for a writer comes from the path he never expected to take.
Today I live in North Vancouver with my wife. When I’m not writing, I enjoy photography and instrumental music—and I usually write with the music turned up.
The Great Machine Wars is my debut novel and the beginning of my first published series.
Get in touch: contact@alexmagnobooks.com
Instagram: @alexmagnobooks
Amazon: Alex Magno’s author page