The writer Luísa Costa Gomes (Lisbon, 1954) has just won the DST Literature Grand Prize, in its 30th edition, for her book ‘Visitar Amigos e outros contos’. More than 200 entries were submitted for this edition. The prize jury - made up of José Manuel Mendes, Lídia Jorge and Carlos Mendes de Sousa - unanimously chose the author's work, emphasising that ‘the author's short stories surprise with their narrative energy, revealing powerful characters in their sociological and affective diversity, with a refusal of existential inertia and a formal construction that enriches the reading experience’. With a degree in Philosophy, she has an extensive body of work in the fields of fiction (short stories, novels), theatre and opera, but also in other areas - from chronicles to painting. She has been honoured with various awards and forms of recognition. And her latest book, made up of 13 short stories, was considered by critics to be the best book of 2024. Today at 9pm, at the Teatro Circo in Braga, the ceremony to award the dst Literature Grand Prize to the winning author, Luísa Costa Gomes, will take place. We took advantage of the festive occasion to have a chat with the writer.

You've just published another book of short stories - Visitar Amigos e outros contos (D. Quixote, 2024), considered the ‘best book of the year’ by Expresso / Público, and you've now been honoured with the dst Literature Grand Prize. How do you explain your loyalty to the short story genre? What does it mean to receive this award in your career?

Fidelity can only be ‘explained’ on the assumption that it's a healthy relationship, when there's pleasure and dedication. Mind you, fidelity isn't that faithful, I write more theatre and romance than I do short stories. And as for awards, this isn't just another award. This book hasn't won any other awards. The dst Literature is the only one, and that's why it's even more cherished.

These thirteen short stories collected in Visitar Amigos, with their diversity of stories and situations told in the past and present, reveal some of the thematic preferences of your writing. Can you comment on some of these tendencies?

It seems to me that diversity is the rule, because it opens up thematic horizons, different approaches, different treatments of historical time, but yes, these are short stories that centre on experiences, on the importance of duration, continuing what I had done in the previous collection, Afastar-se. Relating it to the previous book, which had as its guiding thread the idea of the primacy of experience and its irreducibility to the so-called ‘meaning of life’, with some short stories centred around the absurdities of amorous passion, Visitar Amigos extends this primacy to the always singular experience of history and time. The fundamental tendency is perhaps to question what is taken for granted, to analyse what appears to be self-evident, to treat the permanent as illusory...

In this book of short stories, as in other books of yours, readers and critics are confronted with various forms of more or less acid irony and humour in general. What place do these registers occupy in your writing in general and in your vision of the world?

I think that humour, acidic or not, is part of everyone's literary style. You can't remove the humour of the text from the humour of the author of the text, it's his look, his ‘way’. Laughing at The Fall of an Angel is not the same as laughing at Quincas Borba or The Magic Mountain. Did you find the last one strange? Readers don't remember Thomas Mann's humour and yet the book has some hilarious parts. It also has to do with expectations... If you go in wanting to be bored, even the circus clowns will bore you. Humour doesn't come and go, I don't need it, it's not an extra that happens afterwards to lighten things up. I want to believe that I'm a humourist, although few people give me that credit. I'm like that character in Machado de Assis, who wrote marvellous and popular polkas, and who insisted on wanting to write waltzes, because it was the waltz that was noble. In my case, it's perhaps the opposite: they want to force me into the dignity of the serious. My way, for better or for worse, is to be irritated by (more or less) everything, or even everything.

She has a degree in Philosophy and was a teacher in this field. Someone asks in her writing about the pedagogical role of history: "But does he believe in prophylaxis through history? Does he think they won't do it again?" The answer is clear: "Yes, perhaps, but not in the same way. They will do it again, these, others, sacrificing others, or more of them." In times more inclined towards dystopia, what can we learn from history? If we can learn anything from the past, some wonder.

There is no answer to this question, at least no credible answer. Let's look to history for the lessons that suit us; the philosophy of history is as historical and epochal as history itself. We live in a time when this is absolutely visible, with the new critique of colonial and patriarchal history and the fundamental importance given to slavery in the creation of modern capitalism. In this story, given that the protagonist is a palaeontologist and the interlocutor a historian of human history, the meaning of history is eminently different, its scales, its interpretations. The palaeontological vision, the reflection on the Anthropocene, are different ways of understanding time, in which humans play a rather modest role.

Regardless of whether we learn from history, we can evoke the past, construct narratives in times past, as happens in some of your short stories, returning to the times of 1974-75. What does this evocation mean to you? A tribute, a critical assessment, a simple pleasure in evoking?

A euphoric language, a disruption, a time of passionate turmoil. In The Prodigal Boy we have this serotonous student, always tangential to the eye of the hurricane, arrested by the Pide without having any revolutionary convictions, and who then goes on to spend a lifetime of service to others as a provincial doctor. There's something of Plutarch's ‘Lives’ in these stories, as well as Pontiggia's ‘Lives of Non-Illustrious Men’ and Rosebud's ‘Citizen Kane’. Lives, what you do, what happens to you, and how to deal with it all. And how to tell them without doing them a gross injustice.

In the face of so many critical and extreme situations in the contemporary world, wars and political and social upheavals, in the face of successive threats to democracy itself, is there still room for hope? Does the anxiety and fear in which so many citizens live today force us to rethink the world we want?

I don't know. As for hope, it's like the happiness spoken of in the Mahabaratta. It's inevitable. The brain can't cope with reality as it is. It creates rosy futures, creates skies, creates liberations, creates palliatives. It gives apologetic explanations. It absolves us of responsibility. As long as we realise that all of this is our own creation, there's no harm in hope, quite the opposite. I think it's always better to rethink the world in joy and pleasure; rethinking it out of fear can create even more anguish. Don't ask me how to do it, that's a task for new people.

Can the increasingly dominant powers of the capitalist system and advances in technology (including artificial intelligence) mould new facets of the human being in the immediate future? How do you see the presence of artificial intelligence in everyday life and even in the world of creativity and culture?

I don't know. First point: it doesn't seem possible to regulate these aventesmas at the moment. The United States wants at least ten years without regulation so they can manoeuvre the market, Europe is lazy and has no autonomy. We've all given up. You can't control the flow of evil, for the simple reason that it's practical and everyone gains something. The devil is practical. Chat GPT is unstoppable, it will only be stopped by a machine with more functions, faster, that is even less work. Human beings are practical. What's practical and doesn't take any work is good. Meanwhile, we are becoming more and more like mobile phones. We're rapidly turning into androids, with android bodies and android heads, but much more stupid than robots. Sometimes I think that God is a machine. It's not deus ex machina, it's the machine. We do what mobile phones tell us to do: pick up, switch on, switch off, take a selfie, post, reply, say an inanity, listen to a hundred other inanities and so life goes on. What to do? Nothing, do as everyone else does, say ‘how awful’ and carry on. Say ‘oh, what about the children?’ and hand over the mobile phone. To watch a video. So I don't have any great opinions, I just observe what's going on. People no longer have any patience for other people. They're isolated in personalising their feeds. To do otherwise, to resist, to read, to create, to have complex ideas, all this smacks of fundamentalism.

Throughout his multifaceted work, he has published novels, short stories (he also directed a short story magazine, Ficções), chronicles, many theatre plays and opera librettos. And you still have the time and creativity to devote to painting. How do you explain this diverse activity?

I have no possible explanation, apart from the immense pleasure it gives me. I find it impossible to explain. It's my profession. With the aggravating factor that I don't want to do anything else, perhaps you could call it a vocation. I don't know if you still understand what a vocation is? It has to do with calling, a slightly religious imagery that I don't identify with. I have two contradictory feelings that have always dominated me: the first, my privilege in being able to do what I do, an internal privilege that can disappear at any moment. That inspiration, which can be eclipsed by a bad encounter in life or by any catastrophe that befalls us. The other tells me that I've been writing since I was ten, I've been publishing since I was thirty, book after book, it's called a profession. In other words, I have a double technical-romantic attitude towards writing and painting.

We're celebrating the birthdays of Luís de Camões and Camilo Castelo Branco. What do these authors mean in their writing? How relevant are they today?

Camilo is the mentor of my introduction to literature, my first novel called O Pequeno Mundo (The Little World) began as a parody of Camilo's world and language. I never met Camões, apart from a few passages from Os Lusíadas included in the opera Corvo Branco, until this year, when I wrote a libretto, entitled Relicário Perpétuo, to mark the 500th anniversary of his birth. The opera, with music by Luís Tinoco and staging by Nuno Carinhas, was commissioned by the National Library and the São Carlos National Theatre.

In a permanent society of the spectacle, dominated by multiple urgencies, social networks, unbridled forms of narcissism, noise, misinformation, loneliness and psychotic behaviour proliferate. Is your literary writing sensitive to themes like these and how do you think about them?

Green Eyes already dealt with this universe of noise, it's a novel from the early 1990s, when the first private channels opened in Portugal. Little has changed, it's become much worse, within the expected model. But what I deal with in the novel, a story in which the two protagonists never meet and which is inspired by the Icelandic sagas, is the death of interiority. It's the behaviourist paradigm, the idea that what counts is what you see, what you do, what you show. The interior of the characters, first invented by the naturalist novel of the 19th century with its omniscient narrator, disappears to make way for the enigmatic exteriority of what is done. It's like reducing literature to what you can see. That's why there was a short essay in the middle of the novel about George Berkeley, the philosopher of ‘to be is to be perceived’, and his solipsistic universe. The image produces solitude, because what it gives, it takes away. It gives an ersatz, an icon, a simulacrum, it takes away presence, sensible being, truth.

For many, in the hecatomb of the ‘grand narratives’, religion has also entered into crisis in the contemporary world. What is your vision and personal relationship with religion?

I'm an apostate and generally against all churches, whether political parties or apocalyptic sects. That said, I naturally have some kinship with mystics and anchorites, but with the privilege of good wifi. The Life of Ramón, a novel written in the 1990s, reinvents the life of this Mallorcan mystic and his fight against God, who wanted to make him a Dominican. But he became a Franciscan, although not completely, and never sure of anything he did. The mystic, if he doesn't get it into his head to preach the good life, is harmless, lives in his head, let him be.

A defining moment in my adult life had to do with the revelation that Francis of Assisi, the hero and role model of my childhood, was actually schizophrenic. He heard voices, undressed in public and had a manic competition with others for humility and humiliation. There's a moment in Fioretti when he demands that the others trample on him, trample on his head. Rossellini's film is exemplary in its description of the ‘divine madness’ of the Franciscans, common to Llull, who called himself ‘mad for God’. Foll deu fool que é bôbo. God's fool is a good epithet for anyone.

In a world of violence and growing symptoms of dystopia, dominated by various forms of disbelief, perhaps we can provocatively repeat and paraphrase the old question of a character from Dostoyevsky - can Beauty, Art, Literature save us? In other words, what is the place or power of literature today?

Literature and art have the power, as they always have, that everyone gives them. There are, have been, will be people who are sensitive to a singular human gesture, to a characteristic, idiosyncratic, radically personal vision of the world. I'm not talking about crowds of readers, there have never been crowds of readers. If there isn't, as is the case with the United States at the moment, a deliberate destruction of universities, libraries, research grants and everything that looks like innovative creation, I think Literature will make its way, from mouth to ear, always changing, probably always maintaining its own ‘way’ of looking through what language can do when well manoeuvred. The times are not favourable. The media spread hate, it's their livelihood. Social networks live off publicity, selling eyeballs, which can only be achieved with lies and indignation. There has been social engineering - people are very easily engineered, much more easily than you might think - and the last thirty, forty years have produced a paradigm shift, from corporate to economic-corporate and from there to financial-corporate, and from popular capitalism to barefaced neoliberalism. Trump and his ilk are the visible face of what has been achieved socially and culturally over this time. An apologia for ignorance and irrationality, the celebritisation of politics.

In the United States itself, from what I see of shows and podcasters, the discussion continues about ‘are we sliding towards authoritarianism?’, and even with ICE on the streets rounding up, at this point, three thousand people a day (!!!), we see them sitting around discussing ‘the health of democracy’. Fortunately, millions have realised that there is no democracy at all and that the dictator is really a dictator of the kind they imagined existed only in South America (usually, by the way, supported by American democracy). But there's no point in crying over spilt milk. It's time to organise the resistance and know that, at least here in Portugal, we'll be in a minority for some time to come. And it still has to get worse before it gets better. I'm sorry I don't have any better news to tell you - it's no coincidence that I have a reputation as a pessimist.