Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
As advice to budding authors goes, getting a job in a high-class brothel is unusual, to say the least.
Yet, as a growing wave of young Brazilian prostitutes are discovering, it is not a bad career path to literary fame and fortune.
Rachel Pacheco, a former call girl better known in Brazil by her nom de guerre, Bruna Surfistinha or Bruna the Surfer Girl, is unlikely to win a Nobel prize for her debut book The Scorpion’s Sweet Venom: The Diary of a Brazilian Call Girl. But a year after swapping boudoirs for book signings, she has sold more than 140,000 copies in Brazil — a vast number in a country obsessed by soap opera, where publishing companies generally struggle to shift a tenth of that.
A film based on Pacheco’s book, written by Karim Ainouz, one of Brazil’s most respected directors, will hit the big screen next year, while her novel will be launched around the world by Bloomsbury in November.
Pacheco sees her work as an important weapon in fighting prejudice against sex workers.
Tom Phillips
