Ely José Couto is the pen name of Afonso José Pereira Couto (he/him). He likes to pretend it's not weird to write in the third person and that he was very creative with his pseudonym.

Ely suffers from a severe problem: loving everything and knowing that he won't live long enough to experience it all. He contains multitudes and all that stuff. This was a great challenge to tackle in his youth, that one of deciding what the hell to do with his life. The answer came by happenstance and out of despair. He'd tried everything from programming to baking to rocketry to tutoring. Writing, though, would allow him to live as many lives as he wanted. It stuck.

He ended up studying electrical and computer engineering, a subject he came to deeply resent. Thus, once he finished that bachelor's, he jumped onto another in classical languages. Why? He doesn't know why either, other than that he liked the subject. Maybe that was the point.

During the day, he works on stuff related to solar panels. The rest of the time he reads whatever he can get his hands on, decides to learn yet another subject or language or whatever he feels like at the time, plays guitar or piano (he has a thing for Fado because he's Portuguese), watches anime with his partner and dogs, and, most importantly, writes.

There are a lot of things left to say. Hopefully, they'll all be written down by the time he's old and withered as a raisin. For now, even though he's been writing pretty much daily since 2020, his words are slowly bleeding out into the open world. Let's see how far they go.

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Current Projects

Ely is currently seeking representation for his latest novel, "It Crawls Under Your Skin."

Other than that, he’s working on a bunch of things. Parallel to short stories, Ely is writing a weird horror novel about a cognizant blob of flesh sent by God. He’s also rewriting and editing an epic sci-fi fantasy trilogy about the only planet left in the universe after a galactic catastrophe. Finally, he’s crafting a collection of four novellas on the theme of death. Lovely stuff. Oh, and he writes poems and doesn’t know what to do with them.