News 28 of April of 2020

Livraria lello launches the “quarantine tales” prize

The Prize comes with a total of 6,000 euros and publication in a book of six unpublished stories by new (national and international) authors.
Entries open until the end of May.

For the last month, we have turned an unprecedented white page in our collective socialisation. On this blank page, we struggle against the full-stops and adopt, as a community, reservations as our way of existing but never as our way of being with the latter always interspersed with the exclamations and questioning that keep us on our way.

It is precisely these exclamations and questionings that we wish to evoke throughout all the community that reads and that, therefore, writes. The Livraria Lello community of readers and writers does not align with punctuating these far distant reservations and needs an exclamatory and questioning punctuation to state just who they are, why they feel, think, desire, suffer: in a single phrase, what they live and not only what there is.

Hence, we lay down this challenge to all those who like (or now discover that they like) writing and have something to say and to tell us about these blank days and nights. This challenge is precisely that of launching a new award, such as the Livraria Lello – Eduardo Lourenço Prize set up last year, also founded and sponsored by Livraria Lello. With this latest challenge, this new Livraria Lello “Quarantine Tales” Prize, we seek to discover and help bring forth six national and international authors who submit otherwise unpublished tales of literary fiction

in a short story format, original works by the author that have not been submitted to any other competition and/or eventually awaiting some pending decision.

The originals may be delivered to Livraria Lello through to the last minute of May and should run between a dozen and two dozen pages in length, with each winning short story awarded a cheque of €1,000 and a publishing contract with Livraria Lello in accordance with the regulations due for release in the immediate future when the composition of the specialist jury shall also be announced for the selection of the six Livraria Lello “Quarantine Tales”.

Father António Vieira once told us, with all his enlightened verve, “we are what we do, (...) on the days when we do not do, we only persist.” Hence, we perceive this prize as a call to make these times be and not only endure and that, having already lasted too long in our realities, may endure still further but no longer within ourselves and in the literature told, freeing us all so that we may return to being in society everything that which this pandemic has proven we should be even when confined.