It is with great pleasure that we announce the three finalists selected by this edition's jury: Ana Bigotte Vieira, Cucha Carvalheiro and Jorge Palinhos. After a period of deliberation, in which 86 texts considered eligible were analyzed, the choice fell on the following candidate works:
Belisa Branças Luz Ribeiro Telma Fernandes
“Das cinzas ou das Brasas” “Lacuna” “Papel Passado”
About each of the selected works, the jury wrote:
“ Das Cinzas ou das Brasas is a tense text, which seeks to account for the fluidity of today's human relations, determined by precariousness, ephemerality, which delves into the interstices of human relations today, with strong computer mediation, which oscillates between impersonality of fortuitous encounters and confessionalism before the masses, between desperate cynicism and commercial innocence, between the endlessly banal and the fleeting mystical, in the search for a theater that realizes that we are all scapegoats sacrificed in honor of no god.”
“In Lacuna, a play written as a tribute to a schizophrenic grandmother, the lack of words serves as a theatrical mechanism to reveal an absence that is sometimes suppressed on stage in an intuitive way, contradicting the rational device of whiteness, the even if, ultimately, it shapes the grandmother's life, (possibly) motivating her illness. Lacuna is then, and among other things, a long poem-reflection about a black grandmother seen through the eyes of childhood and theorized today, in the light of a present that does not want to be past, and, as such, necessarily anti-racist. So that there can be a future.”
“The author of Papel Passado creates a fiction around two characters who confront us with violence, political, social and even sexual repression during the time of the Brazilian military dictatorship. In a time like the one we live in, in which the extreme right is gaining ground in Europe and authoritarian regimes are spreading across the globe, we were sensitive to the relevance of an issue that many want to whitewash and the most incautious are unaware of.”
The three finalists will now begin a process of mentoring and eventual improvement of the texts, with the support of each member of the jury, which will last until the end of August.
Congratulations to the 3 finalist authors and we wish you all an excellent period of mentoring.
In October we will select the winner, who will be awarded the monetary value of €750 and included in the program of the 8th season of the Festim of readings of theater texts - This night screams, which takes place from October to December 2024, in addition to being published in a book, through a partnership with the publisher Douda Correria.
In total over the four editions of the Prize, more than 430 applications were received by the organization from various Portuguese-speaking countries. In this edition, around 60% of the texts were by authors of Portuguese nationality, with Brazilians being the second most represented with 34%.
More information about the 4th edition of the New Dramaturgy Award for Female Authorship on the website www.cepatorta.org/premio-literario .
Companhia Cepa Torta is supported by the Portuguese Republic – Culture / General Directorate of Arts