Born in Angola, and raised in Portugal, paulo da costa is a writer, editor and translator living in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies (Moh’kins’tsis / Calgary, Alberta). He is thrice the recipient of the James H. Gray Award for Short Nonfiction (2024, 2023 and 2020), the 2024 Outstanding Calgary Artist Award, as well as the 2003 Commonwealth First Book Prize for the Canada-Caribbean Region, the W. O. Mitchell City of Calgary Book Prize and the Canongate Prize for short-fiction. His poetry, fiction and non-fiction have been published widely in literary magazines around the world and translated into Italian, Spanish, Serbian, Slovenian and Portuguese.

Trust the Bluer Skies: Meditations on Fatherhood, a book of creative non-fiction, was published in 2024 with University of Regina Press.