Brazil does books as well as football

At the recent launch event for FlipSide, a festival of Brazilian literature and culture in the Suffolk village of Snape, Brazil's ambassador to the UK aired a grievance. He had just visited the embassy of Argentina, and had been shown a new scholarly companion volume to the works of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. "I was envious," he confessed. "Why aren't there similar volumes about some of the classic Brazilian authors?" The answer, he concluded with regret, is that even Brazilian writers as celebrated as Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) or Graciliano Ramos (1892-1953) are not widely known to English-language readers.

Despite the common complaint that not enough Brazilian literature is published in English, this is an auspicious moment for new Brazilian writing in translation. The past couple of months have seen the publication of works by two authors named among the best of young Brazilian novelists by Granta magazine. Michel Laub's Diary of the Fall (translated by Margaret Jull Costa) is a powerful exploration of memory and guilt, drawing connections between a disastrous high-school prank and the Holocaust, and Daniel Galera's atmospheric Blood-Drenched Beard (translated by Alison Entrekin) features a protagonist who cannot recognise faces – including his own.

Further highlights expected later this year include a slim memoir by columnist Diogo Mainardi, who is better known for his astringent political views. In The Fall (also translated by Jull Costa) he tells the moving story of his son Tito's brain damage following a botched operation at birth in a Venetian clinic, weaving in a wealth of references from Canaletto and Le Corbusier to Hitchcock and U2. Other titles worth looking out for include two translated by Daniel Hahn – Nowhere People, by Paulo Scott, and the delightful backlands fable The Saint's Head, by Gabriel García Márquez's protege Socorro Acioli. The House in Smyrna, by Granta nominee Tatiana Salem Levy (Entrekin) will be published in early 2015.These launches come hot on the heels of last year's publication of the coming-of-age road-novel Crow Blue, by Denver-based Adriana Lisboa (Entrekin); of semi-autobiographical, award-winning and bestselling The Eternal Son, by Cristovão Tezza (Entrekin); of Rodrigo de Souza Leão's posthumously published exploration of madness, All Dogs Are Blue (translated by Stefan Tobler and Zöe Perry); and of Alberto Mussa's period whodunnit, The Mystery of Rio (translated by Alex Ladd).

Alongside these works are novels by veterans of English-language publication, including satirist Luís Fernando Veríssimo, author of The Spies (Jull Costa), and singer-turned-author Chico Buarque, whose Spilt Milk (Entrekin), a poignant evocation of Rio de Janeiro's decline through the eyes of its centenarian protagonist, confirmed him as one of Brazil's most accomplished novelists. But this tantalising list of books available in English only begins to scratch the surface. Many delights await English language readers in the works of yet-to-be-translated writers including television and film actress Fernanda Torres, whose Rio-based debut novel The End has proved she is as talented on the written page as she is on the screen; or Chilean-born Carola Saavedra, who maps out intimate geographies in formally bold novels including Blue Flowers and Landscape with Dromedary; or Andréa del Fuego, whose excellent The Malaquías updates the Brazilian novel of rural hardship.Reproduction, the latest work by Bernardo Carvalho (whose beguiling Nine Nights has already appeared in English), serves up a scathing depiction of the average member of Brazil's chattering classes – in thrall to social media, gleaning information from glossy news weeklies, spouting banalities and broadcasting his barely concealed social prejudices. Paulo Lins, on whose novel City of God the celebrated film was based, has published his long-awaited follow-up, Since Samba Is Samba, a dramatised history of the origins of Brazil's most emblematic musical genre. Meanwhile, publisher and novelist Marcelo Ferroni has been playfully poking at the boundaries between fact and fiction in his account of Ché Guevara's final days, Practical Guide to Guerrilla Warfare.

Brazilian publishers (and readers) seem less averse than their English-language counterparts to short-form fiction, and it is there that the most remarkable Brazilian talents can be found. Sérgio Sant'Anna has been ploughing his own lonely furrow, writing dark and transgressive short stories and novellas for decades. Despite winning many of Brazil's top literary prizes, he remains mostly untroubled by English-language publishers. João Anzanello Carrascoza, who also favours the short form, is a recent embodiment of its endless possibilities, and perhaps one of its finest contemporary practitioners.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the military coup that inaugurated one of the country's darkest periods. Bernardo Kucinski's novel K (translated by Sue Branford), is loosely based on his own experiences following his sister's "disappearance" during the military dictatorship. The regime, and the moral compromises it forced upon Brazil's elites, were among the themes in journalist Edney Silvestre's fiction debut, If I Close My Eyes Now (translated by Nick Caistor) and in Milton Hatoum's Ashes of the Amazon (in John Gledson's elegant version). There is a well-documented tradition of political engagement in Brazilian literature – though it may be some time before the demonstrations that have rocked the country since last July find their way into fiction.

In the year of the World Cup it is worth remembering that football has its place in Brazilian literature. Even when it isn't the main topic, the national sport is often background noise. Chico Buarque has admitted that when imagining the Hungarian capital for his novel, Budapest, he named the invented streets after players of Hungary's legendary 1954 World Cup squad, including Puskás, Kocsis and Hidegkuti.

Playwright and journalist Nelson Rodrigues (1912-1980) was among the first to document and dramatise the ways in which the temporary triumphs and eternal agonies of Brazilian football were inseparable from the dramas of daily life. He has found worthy successors in Laub, whose early novel, Second Half, tells the story of a couple's breakup against the backdrop of the football derby in his home town of Porto Alegre; or in André Sant'Anna (son of Sérgio), author of Paradise Is Really Cool, whose protagonist is an ailing Brazilian footballer pondering his unlikely conversion to Islam in a Berlin hospital. The Dribble, a recently published novel by Sérgio Rodrigues, featuring a worn-out football commentator, is perhaps the first ever to equate the exploits of players such as Didi, Falcão and Zidane to the pyrotechnic prose of Vladimir Nabokov.

This variety of literary styles and subject matter challenges easy assumptions about what contemporary Brazilian literature can offer –and indeed about what it means to be a Brazilian today.