Fabula Festival: José Luís Peixoto – Galveias

On a perfectly ordinary evening in January, the quiet serenity of a small Portuguese town is shattered by the fall of a celestial body that poisons the town of Galveias and its inhabitants with a series of explosions emitting a pungent sulphurous odour. An encounter between a macrocosm and microcosm opens up a realm for the meeting of people with closely guarded (little and big) secrets. The delicate balance in the shared lives of fictional characters is slowly revealed, the monotonous existence in a small town trapped in the clutches of tradition and predictable, never-changing patterns. A town that cannot shake off its torpor even after a contact with an unknown or unnamed space rock, an emissary from cosmic space. The catalyst for the town’s emergence from lethargy is the birth of a child who connects the inhabitants and encourages them to make the necessary steps for a new life and a viable future, while symbolizing – against the background of the cosmic event – the link between a melancholy past and the conflicts and challenges of modernity. 

The novel has been translated into Slovenian by Blažka Müller.

José Luís Peixoto (1974) is one of Portugal's most acclaimed young novelists. Peixoto's poetry and novels have been translated in over thirty languages. His first novel, Nenhum Olhar, (published as "Blank Gaze" in the UK) was shortlisted for all major literary awards in Portugal and won the Jose Saramago Literary Prize, awarded every two years for the best novel written in all Portuguese-speaking countries. Peixoto's first work of fiction, Morreste-me (published in the UK as 'You Died on Me') was selected by Visao as one of their best books of the decade. In 2003, he wrote the short-story collection Antidote in a joint project with the heavy metal band Moonspell, which brought in new readers all around the world. In 2007, his novel Cemitério de Pianos (published as 'The Piano Cemetery' in the UK) won the Calamo Award for the best translated novel published in Spain. An even bigger breakthrough came in 2016 with the novel Galveias, which won the Oceanos Award, the Portuguese equivalent to the prestigious Booker Prize. 

The event will be held in Portuguese, with simultaneous translation into Slovenian.