Why Do We Tell Stories?
Why Do We Tell Stories?
Why do we tell stories? This is the motto for a three-way conversation with those who tell stories, whether fictional, real, or a cross between the two. We reflect on the human need to create narratives, not only to represent the world and its past, but to reveal it in all its possibilities, and make it live in the unique way that, sometimes, only literature can reveal. Telling stories is like planting seeds, it activates everyday gestures of memory, care, persistence. During this conversation, we also explore the personal and political importance of fiction, a place where words become resistance and the imaginary a territory of contagion. The meeting brings together three writers who explore these paths through the writing of Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, author of several fiction and literature books, Inês Brasão, sociologist and historian, who has recovered the forgotten history of slave labour, and Inês Lampreia, author of No tempo dos Super Heróis (In The Time of Superheroes) (2024) who, based on memories told by her grandparents, evokes the life and resistance of the Alentejo countryside in the mid-20th century.
22 JAN 2026
THU 19:00
Free entry*
Duration 2h
In portuguese
*mediante pré-inscrição disponível em culturgest.pt ou levantamento de bilhete 15 min. antes (sujeito à lotação da sala). As pré-inscrições não levantadas são disponibilizadas 15 min. antes do início da conferência
BIOGRAPHIES
Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida is a writer. She is the author of several books, including Esse Cabelo, Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso, As Telefones, Três Histórias de Esquecimento, Ferry, and Toda a Ferida é uma Beleza, which won the 2024 APE/DGLAB Grand Prize for Novel and Novella. Her books and essays have received multiple awards, including the Oceanos Prize, and have been translated into ten languages. In 2023, she received the FLUL Alumni Prize from the Faculty of Arts of the University of Lisbon, where she completed her doctorate. In 2025, she received the Vergílio Ferreira Prize from the University of Évora for her body of literary work. She has taught at New York University. She writes for Quatro Cinco Um and Observador. She was born in Luanda.
Inês Brasão has been a Sociology Professor at the Polytechnic Institute of Leiria since 1997 and holds a PhD in Sociology and Historical Economics from NOVA FCSH. In 1998, she received the Carolina Michaelis de Vasconcelos Prize. In 2011, she was awarded the Maria Lamas Prize for her study of domestic servitude in Portugal, which was published as the book O Tempo das Criadas. Since 2020, she has coordinated the Digital Archive of the History of Domestic Servile Work – Memórias de Servidão – DHLAB-IHC-NOVA FCSH.
Among other books, she has published Fêmea, uma História Ilustrada das Mulheres, Dons e Disciplinas do Corpo Feminino, and Hotel, os Bastidores. Her research interests span social history, labour history, and women’s history. She is a senior researcher at IHC (NOVA FCSH) and a collaborator at CITUR (IPL).
Inês Lampreia is a writer of fiction and poetic prose. In 2011, she won the Casa do Alentejo prize for her short story Cinco Dedos de Cortiça. Her work has been published by various publishers, including Editora Urutau, Edições Pasárgada, Centro Mário Cláudio, Uppsala University, and Kultivera Editions, as well as in international journals.
She has developed writing and reading projects with homeless people, inmates of the Forensic Psychiatric Wing at Parque de Saúde de Lisboa, young migrants, and students in exile. Between 2016 and 2021, she was one of the lead writers in the Young Writers Lab — an international writing laboratory. More recently, she conceived a two-year writing project with participants from Bosnia, Syria, Ukraine, Turkey, and Sweden, resulting in the literary performance Gestures or Acts of Disappearance.
Her literary work articulates a critical vision of the human condition, emphasising the fissures of experience. She writes Crónicas da Pós-Normalidade for the cultural platform Coffeepaste, offering a critical reading of the present and questioning ideas of productivity, efficiency, and normality in an ever-accelerating world.
Inês Lampreia holds a degree in Journalism (ESCS-IPL) and a Master’s in Communication, Culture, and Information Technologies (ISCTE). She has worked as a journalist and, alongside her literary career, has developed a professional path in cultural communication. Since 2022, she has been a guest assistant professor at the Escola Superior de Dança (IPL), teaching the course Communication in Arts, and she provides training in cultural communication and writing across various institutional and independent organisations throughout Portugal.
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