Jair Bolsonaro’s lawyers appear to have been reading up on the country’s penal code and have found a way to help their client reduce the 27-year prison sentence he received last year for plotting a coup: by reading books.

There is only one problem: the former far-right Brazilian president has never been known as a bibliophile. “Sorry, I don’t have time to read,” Bolsonaro once declared. “It’s been three years since I read a book.”

Brazilian law contains a literary device through which book-reading inmates can cut their sentences by four days for each title read. On Thursday, a supreme court judge authorised the disgraced former president to take part in the scheme after a request from his legal team.

Bolsonaro, a former paratrooper famed for his hostility to democracy, minorities, the Amazon rainforest and the arts, is unlikely to appreciate the approved reading list. It includes Brazilian works on Indigenous rights, racism, the environment and the violence meted out by the country’s 1964-85 dictatorship – a regime Bolsonaro openly supported.

One title, Ana Maria Gonçalves’ 950-page Um Defeito de Cor (A Colour Defect), tells “the history of Brazil … from the point of view of a Black woman”.

Also featured is Democracy!, a children’s non-fiction picture book by the English-born author-illustrator Philip Bunting.

Some of the books on the list, such as Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, are more than 1,000 pages long. Bolsonaro did once appear in public with a similarly sized tome – Winston Churchill’s 1,000-plus page Memoirs of the Second World War – but it is unclear if the former president read it.

In order to benefit from the sentence reduction scheme, prisoners must prove they have actually read the books by submitting written reports to prison authorities.

Asked to name his favourite book during the 2018 presidential election, Bolsonaro plumped for one by Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, a notorious army colonel accused of torturing hundreds of prisoners during the dictatorship. “It’s a real story about Brazil … with facts, with data, with places with real episodes,” enthused Bolsonaro who was this week transferred to a maximum security prison in the capital, Brasília, after spending Christmas imprisoned at a federal police base.

Ustra’s book does not feature on the justice system’s reading list but it does contain one title, Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s I’m Still Here, about the plight of prisoners who disappeared into such torture centres.

Brazil has elected its first Black woman to the Brazilian Academy of Letters, founded in 1897 and modelled on the Académie Française.

Ana Maria Gonçalves, 54, is one of Brazil’s most acclaimed contemporary authors, and her election on Thursday is being widely celebrated by writers, activists, literary scholars and President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Her most famous work, Um defeito de cor (A Colour Defect) is still untranslated into English. It is a 950-page historical novel that she describes as “the history of Brazil told from the point of view of a Black woman”.

Recently selected as the greatest work of Brazilian literature of the 21st century so far by the newspaper Folha de S Paulo, the book achieved the rare combination of both critical and popular success, with more than 180,000 copies sold since its release in 2006.

Celebrating Gonçalves’s victory, Lula wrote that the book was his “companion” during his 580 days in prison, “and I always make a point of recommending it to everyone.”

Now, the author hopes that her election to the 128-year-old academy – whose primary mission is the preservation of the Portuguese language and Brazilian literature – may help correct what she sees as a longstanding historical injustice.

“I’m the first Black woman, but I can’t be the only one,” said Gonçalves, who will be just the sixth woman among the 40 members, or “immortals”, as they refer to themselves. Apart from two Black men and the first and only Indigenous writer to join the institution, all the others are white men.

“I can’t carry the weight of representing an entire population that continues to be marginalised and that is itself incredibly diverse,” she said.

The academy had as its first president a Black man, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, widely considered the greatest Brazilian writer of all time. Despite still being known as the House of Machado de Assis, the academy has since had only a handful of other Black men as members – something many see as a stark illustration of how racism operates in a country where more than half the population is of African descent.

Poet and translator Stephanie Borges, 40, believes Gonçalves’s election will encourage more Black women to become readers and writers. “When it’s us telling our own stories, we invite those who look like us to come closer to literature,” she said.

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Cidinha da Silva, 58, author of more than 20 books, is keen to stress that Gonçalves was not elected because she is Black, but “because she is one of the greatest living writers in Brazil”.

There were 13 candidates in the running, and of the 31 members who voted in Thursday’s election, 30 chose Gonçalves – the remaining vote went to Eliane Potiguara, 74, who had hoped to become the first Indigenous woman to join the academy.

Gonçalves had to run a sort of “campaign” – though she emphasises she never asked for votes – in which she sent a copy of her book and a personal letter to each member, and phoned some of them to discuss her work.

In 2018, another celebrated Black writer, Conceição Evaristo, 78, also stood for election, but received just one vote.

“The academy does need more women, more Black people, Indigenous people, and people from other parts of Brazil,” said Gonçalves. “And I hope that now, from the inside, I can help make that happen.”