I am always very pleased to attend the award ceremonies of the literary prizes sponsored by the Estoril-Sol Company.

We are here to publicly distinguish the winners of this edition: Luísa Costa Gomes, to whom the jury awarded the Fernando Namora Prize; and Paulo Bugalho, a beginner in these events, whose first novel was awarded the Revelation Agustina Bessa Luís Prize.

We are somehow paying tribute in this ceremony to three successive authors’ generations, thus proving that our literature continues as vital as it always was in its best periods.

Namora and Agustina, the two patrons of the Estoril-Sol prizes, are in effect names that deeply marked, each in its own way, Portuguese fiction in the second half of the 20th century.

In their books, as much or more than in books on History, we find a true gallery of live pictures of the Country we were and of the Country that, in many features, we continue to be.

From the Minho manors to the Alentejo ranches, from the Beira villages to the Lisbon districts, there is a complete world that has been recreated in the imagination of those authors, which captures with surprising fidelity what we really are and singles us out as a people.

This is, after all, the secret of the art, particularly of literature. The novels and tales of great authors, such as Namora e Agustina, provides us with the opportunity to view as a whole the deepness of this web of feelings, where intercourse is carried out amongst people and the cohesion of communities is cemented.

The book by Luísa Costa Gomes, winner of the Fernando Namora Prize, reveals precisely this power that fiction has to lead us to the innermost being, over and above the foam of events.

As expressed in the minutes of the decision to award the Prize, «the jury considered the work entirely innovative, whether due to its excellent construction, to its agile record of style, constantly ironic, or even to its penetrating analysis of some typical behaviours in current Portuguese society».

Luísa Costa Gomes thus surprises us, once again, with a book whose title – illusion (or whatever you wish) – is, itself, full of irony.

Her gifts as a novelist and as a playwright have been well known and duly recognized for a long time. We are witnessing an already extensive literary career, which accumulates titles, some of them already translated into several languages and awarded prizes by several institutions.

It is my wish that the Prize we are handing her today, in addition to being another well deserved proof of recognition, will also be a stimulus for the author to continue her work and to write such inspired works as she has published until now.

To the winner of the Revelation Prize, neurologist Paulo Bugalho, to whom the jury pointed out «the capacity to create protagonists» and «the qualities of style and composition» evidenced in the novel Seneca’s head, I also want to express my admiration and regard.

We are all aware of the already ancient tradition of physicians who are, at the same time, great authors, reconciling the writing of novels or poetry with professional and scientific experience in hospitals.

Fernando Namora was one of them but we could also refer to Lobo Antunes, Miguel Torga, Fialho de Almeida, Júlio Dinis and so many others.

I sincerely hope that this first work published by Paulo Bugalho will be the beginning of another one of those literary paths that are not just developed in parallel with surgery, but also become enriched, humanely and culturally in the daily contact with suffering and sickness.

A word of appreciation is also due to the Estoril –Sol Company.

At a time such as ours, when the temptation to give up is so frequent, to continue investing in arts and literature is a gesture that surely deserves our applause.

I thus salute the officers of Estoril-Sol, for their contribution towards the dynamism and the promotion of Portuguese language and literature, pillars of our identity and privileged means of international assertion.

Thank you very much