Dulce Maria Cardoso wins Grand Prize for Chronicles and Literary Dispersions | Books

The writer Dulce Maria Cardoso won the Grand Prize for Literary Chronicles and Dispersos with the second volume of Unauthorized Autobiographyrevealed this Friday the Portuguese Writers Association.

The jury decided to award the author for “a work composed of true chronicles, (…) that captivate the reader through the combination of brevity and intensity of what is evoked and described”. In Unauthorized Autobiography literary prose “of the highest quality, which transports the reader to what is the true value of the circumstances of which the days are made”, explains the jury.

The first volume Unauthorized Autobiography (Tinta-da-China edition) was published in 2021 and the second in 2023 and brings together chronicles, personal and memorial stories that Dulce Maria Cardoso wrote for the magazine Vision.

“What I tell there is from the truth, it doesn’t mean it’s the truth. It can be fictional, I can’t even start from real facts and put true feelings, it’s my life, I became a character, it’s my life fictionalized, even more so because of memory, which is always a mixture of fiction and imagination”, Dulce Maria Cardoso told Lusa in 2021.

The Grand Prize for Literary Chronicles and Dispersos is an initiative of the Portuguese Writers Association in partnership with Loulé City Council and has a monetary value of 15 thousand euros.

Dulce Maria Cardoso, award-winning author of short stories, chronicles and novels – namely The comeback, My feelings It is Elie -, will receive the award on May 9th, Loulé municipality day.

The jury was made up of Carlos Albino Guerreiro, Helena Carvalhão Buescu and Salvato Teles de Menezes.

In previous editions, the Grand Prize for Literary Chronicles and Dispersos distinguished works by José Tolentino Mendonça, Rui Cardoso Martins, Mário Cláudio, Pedro Mexia, Mário de Carvalho, Lídia Jorge, José Eduardo Agualusa and Miguel Esteves Cardoso.