José Eduardo Agualusa recounted, in chronicles, tales and even entries in his diary, the «confused years» we lived through. He put it all together in a book: “The Most Beautiful End of the World”. Launched during the pandemic, the work won the Grand Prize for Chronicles and Dispersos Literaries that the Angolan writer received this Thursday, May 26, in Loulé.
José Eduardo Agualusa has no doubts: «all awards matter» but this one, in particular, gained another importance.
It's because?
Because, in the six previous editions, it was attributed to names of which Agualusa is an “admirer”.
«They are writers that I like, that I read, like Lídia Jorge, and, therefore, it is a great joy for me», he acknowledged to journalists, even before the ceremony began this morning.
The author, born in Angola, but with Portuguese and Brazilian descent, had arrived in Loulé a few moments ago, but something had already enchanted him.
«What I like most about these southern cities is the light, the clarity. This incredible sky is the first good surprise, but I would need more time to spend a vacation and enjoy it more », he said, between laughs.
As for the work – this “Beautiful End of the World” -, it is, in the words of the writer, a “book that bears witness to these confused years we live in”.
Therefore, throughout the approximately 430 pages, we have a little bit of everything: from the very real memory of Covid-19, to reflections on Bolsonaro or Trump, «walking between fiction and essay», as the synopsis reads. .
The chronicle – a style that Agualusa has practiced for several years, first in Público, now in Visão and the Brazilian newspaper Globo – is, moreover, «a good exercise for a fiction writer».
«Sometimes, there are characters, ideas that come to me in chronicles and that I later return to in a novel. This happened in “O Seller of Pasts”», a book published in 2004 by the author.
On the fact that this Grand Prize for Chronicles and Dispersos Literários, from the Portuguese Association of Writers, has the support of an autarchy far from large urban centers, José Eduardo Agualusa said that, for a writer, “there are no peripheries”.
«Everything is central and everywhere we find reasons for writing and literature, but I think, without a doubt, more and more, it is necessary to create cultural initiatives outside the big centers», he considered.
This award, with which José Eduardo Agualusa won 10 thousand euros, also served for the writer to have a kind of public release of this book, published during the pandemic.
«I was also happy about that because the book will have a different look, a different attention that it didn't have when it was launched», concluded the writer.
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