“Verão Azul” brings literary conversations at dusk, in the garden

The Manuel Teixeira Gomes Municipal Library promotes, for the fifth consecutive year, the cycle of meetings “Blue Summer, shared conversations in the garden”, on the four Saturdays of July, always starting at 6:30 pm.

As usual, the initiative, which is inspired by the title of the book “Agosto Azul”, by the writer born in Portimão and former President of the Republic, Manuel Teixeira Gomes, will take place in Jardim 1º de Dezembro, on the four Saturdays of July, the 5th, 12th, 19th and 26th.

With the aim of promoting literature and current Portuguese authors of reference, this is a prestigious cultural event for the city, which has been gaining a loyal audience. At the same time, the initiative values the 1º de Dezembro Garden, a noble space in the city, transforming it into a place of sociability and conviviality.

Under the theme “The future is already there – glimpses of the literature that is coming”, the fifth edition of “Verão Azul” invites eight prestigious personalities, including fiction writers, poets, essayists, editors and translators, to launch a reflection on the future of literature in the face of the new technological paradigm of Artificial Intelligence, also focusing on the issue of the avant-garde, in the role of literature in a dystopian time and in the literary canon to come.

The cycle of conversations begins with the session on July 5th, entitled “Who’s afraid of Artificial Intelligence?”, to which the poet and editor Maria do Rosário Pedreira and the essayist Manuel Frias Martins are invited.

The reflection will focus on issues related to the impact of Artificial Intelligence on literary creation, the work of translators, the functioning of the publishing market and the possibilities for creative innovation.

In turn, on July 12, with the starting point “Where do the avant-garde of the 21st century stop?”, poets and essayists Pedro Mexia and D. H. Machado question the reasons why the avant-garde literary movements, which tore up conventions and invented new forms of writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, have no correspondence in the twenty-first century.

Novelist Tânia Ganho and art historian Vítor Serrão are the guests of the third conversation of the month, on the 19th, whose theme will be the future of literature and art, under the sign of the question “Portugal 2050: will there still be stories to tell?”.

The questions posed will be related to how literature and art can imagine the near future, at a time when the world seems increasingly unpredictable and chaotic, but also about how the future can be questioned through literature and art history and the possible scenarios, between dystopian threats and the need to maintain hope.

In the fourth and final session, on July 26, journalist and essayist Isabel Lucas and essayist Abel Barros Batista will seek to answer the question “What future canon for the literature of the present?”. How many Portuguese writers will survive the sieve of posterity and who will continue to be read a hundred years from now will be the basis for a more in-depth analysis.

All conversations will be moderated by literary critic José Mário Silva, coordinator of the books section of the Expresso newspaper, and João B. Ventura, literary essayist and editor of the traveling culture magazine Zeus, both curators of this event.