Mia Couto and Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida won in their categories at Associação Portuguesa de Escritores Awards 2024 on July 16, 2024.
Associação Portuguesa de Escritores (English: Portuguese Writers Association) was formed in 1970. Among its flagship activities are the annual literary awards for the best writing in different categories. They include the Grande Prémio de Romance e Novela APE|DGLAB and Prémio de Conto Branquinho da Fonseca da Associação (English: Branquinho da Fonseca Short Story Grand Prize). The latter, which awards short stories in Portuguese, was first handed out in 2023.
The winners for 2024 are;
Prémio de Conto Branquinho da Fonseca da Associação (25,000 euros)
Sponsors: Cascais City Council and the D. Luís I Foundation
Jury: Fernando Batista, Mário Avelar and Paula Mendes Coelho
- Mia Couto’s novel Compêndio para desenterrar nuvens (English: Compendium for unearthing clouds).
Jury comments: The volume consists of twenty-two stories that summon us to distant places, to distant cultures, although very close to us in what concerns the essence (wars, famine, droughts, toxic power relations, violence of all kinds…). The jury also highlighted, in the book, the constant presence of ordinary characters, with their fragmented lives, highlighting the female voices (in the 1st person) and their ancestral ordeal, although some seem to be capable of “turning the world upside down”. Respecting the requirements of the “short story” genre (restraint in means, action, time and space, ending in which the effect caused is essential) and wisely mixing the realistic code and the imaginary code without ever forgetting the lyrical register, Mia Couto continues to denounce injustices wherever they come from, without failing to alert us, albeit in a generally ironic tone, to new submissions, new and very pernicious threats: the loss of memory and concealment of our roots, the violence of new technologies, the new police of customs and language. Among many questions, he leaves us with this one: “Is being happy in these times politically incorrect?”.
Mia Couto comments: “… Mia, always adding up! Congratulations! Besides the fact that the book cover, “Compendium to dig up clouds”, was made from a photo of mine (from the Island of Mozambique, of course)…”
Grande Prémio de Romance e Novela APE|DGLAB (15,000 euros)
Sponsors: Directorate-General for Books, Archives and Libraries, Grândola City Council, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and Instituto Camões.
Jury: José Manuel de Vasconcelos, Carina Infante do Carmo, Carlos Mendes de Sousa, Cândido Oliveira Martins, Cristina Robalo Cordeiro and Francisco Topa,
- Toda a Ferida é uma Beleza (Relógio D’Água) (English: Every Wound is a Beauty (Water Clock)), Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida with illustrations by Isabel Baraona
Jury comments: It was the understanding of the members of the jury, in view of the works entered into the competition, and following a long discussion about the similar quality of a heterogeneous set of novels, to privilege a novel that makes brevity the place of mystery and poetry: in the restraint of its writing lies the essence of the strangeness of a world that is at once naive and cruel, childish and adult. And the reader is taken, by the words as much as by the drawings, to the realm of a merciless fantasy, beyond reality.”
Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida was born in Luanda and grew up in the suburbs of Lisbon
The public ceremony to award the APE/DGLAB Grand Prize for Novels and Short Stories will be announced in due course.
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