Mario Alberto Campos de Morais Prata (Uberaba, February 11, 1946) is a Brazilian writer, playwright, chronicler and journalist. He won recognition as a novelist, author of soap operas and plays, his greatest hits being the novel Stupid Cupid (1976), the plays Fábrica de Chocolate (1979) and Besame Mucho (1982) and the books Schifaizfavoire - Dictionary of Portuguese (1994), Diary of a Slim (1997), My Women and My Men (1998) and Purgatory (2007).

Mario Prata is a miner from Uberaba, but he was raised in the city of Lins from São Paulo. At the age of fourteen, I was already writing "in an old Remington in my father's laboratory ... horrible chronicles, often preaching freedom and doubting the existence of God." At this age he began to write in A Gazeta de Lins, this time signing a social column under the pseudonym Franco Abbiazzi. I was already producing reports and articles.