São Paulo – Founded in 2015, the Dubrasil Book Club brings together Brazilians living in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, who love literature, especially books in Portuguese. This year, the group gained a new resource, a children’s library with books in Portuguese and English.
The space, which already has 400 books, is located in the house of Veronika Topic Eleutério, born in São Paulo (pictured above). She is one of the founders of Dubrasil and says, as the flow of participants is high, private books have become a collective heritage. “This is a city of constant arrivals and departures. Our Brazilian community is always living in several countries. And when people were leaving, they would ask who would accept book donations, and I would say I did. So, I built the little library for the children to borrow the books. And it was opened in February,” she says.
The Brazilian chose to focus the new service on children and says during the summer vacations, demand was high. “From July to August, we lent 88 books. All for free. Children can come and choose as many books as they want. I take a picture of the books, and within a month, they return them to the collection,” she explained.
The Brazilian has a degree in Psychology and has lived in the emirate since 2014. Moving to the Middle East, Eleutério made her mission clear. “The book, for me, has always been fundamental. When we came, we sold everything we had at home and only brought the books,” she revealed about her baggage, which totaled around 1,000 titles.
During the pandemic, Dubrasil started to hold virtual meetings. “The former members of the club were even able to participate again. It was a big group again,” reveals Eleutério. “Our goal is to spread the passion for reading, meet new peoples, and break prejudices and taboos. I believe the book has this ability to make you understand other people and discover they are like you, even with different cultures,” she concluded.
As she was unable to practice her profession as a psychologist in Dubai, the Brazilian took literature as her mission and discovered herself a writer. She released her first book this year through the Brazilian publishing house Editora Rua do Sabão. The children’s book “Cissa e a Diversidade” [Cissa and diversity] has a bilingual version, with texts in Portuguese and English, and is for sale on Amazon.
The initiative is non-profit, and the writer is in contact with institutions to organize the donation of books for readers in the Northeast of Brazil. “I am in talks with some people, and the idea is for sales [of my book] to allow more works to reach the Northeast. It is the region that reads the most in the country, and I have great affection for it,” she highlighted. Of the ten capitals with the highest reading index in Brazil, five are in the Northeast, according to the Portraits of Reading in Brazil survey published in 2020 by Instituto Pró-Livro.
Eleutério also revealed the publishing house would come to the Sharjah International Book Fair this year to negotiate the publication of her work in the UAE. “We have already placed the book in bookstores in Portugal and São Paulo, and we are trying to Italy. Now, this work is also being done to make the publication in Dubai viable,” she detailed.
Translated by Elúsio Brasileiro
