“Tomorrow?”, by Catarina Aires, from the School of Social and Human Sciences (NOVA FCSH), won the first prize of the NOVA ESCRITA Writing Contest. "A text about the passage of time and its effects when isolated", can be read in the announcement from the panel of judges of the contest. In "Tomorrow?", The narrator is "progressively erasing herself from the world that stops calling her, in a form of extreme loneliness in which even her cell phone stops working".
The effects of the isolation caused by the pandemic experience of 2020 are, in fact, the common denominator of all the awarded texts in NOVA ESCRITA Writing Contest. The second prize went to “More with less”, by José Almeida, from the NOVA School of Law. The panel of judges defined the text as “an extremely risky sarcasm exercise, which in the first moments we could not even feel like reading, seeming to have been written by a Dr. Mengele of our times ”. Inês Costa of NOVA FCSH, on the other hand, saw “Faces of Tomorrow” won the third prize of the jury. A “science fiction story”, in which it is revealed that the narrator “will survive” and an optimistic vision of the future is outlined.
Meeting on 7 October 2020, the panel of judges was chaired by Paula Machado (Executive Director of SASNOVA), also constituted by Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida (writer), Rui Cardoso Martins (writer and professor at NOVA FCSH) and João Albuquerque Careers (SASNOVA Culture, Communication and Image Office). The jury highlighted the "quality of writing" and the "sincere way" how the texts respond to the "experience of confinement and loneliness".
Within the scope of the competition, a publication will be made, at the launch of which the prizes will be delivered.