Júlia Portes

Português
Júlia Portes is a writer and actress, and holds a Master’s degree in Performing Arts from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), where she is currently writing her second novel, Little Money, to be published by Fósforo in 2026. She is also leading the ninth edition of her Writing Immersions project, in which she supports artists in the development of their own creative projects. Her debut novel, A Sky Across the Face, was a finalist (Top 5+) to the Jabuti Prize and had launching events in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Berlin in 2023. The novel was also adapted for the stage and is currently touring, with Portes in the cast.
She was selected for the Radar Sofia program in Bulgaria to develop the play How Not to Be Yourself and to open the exhibition Assembly of Shame, curated by Ivo Dimchev, with the performance Career Ending (titled in Brazil as Opening Night). The play has been presented in Bulgaria, at the Brazilian Embassy in Berlin, and at Cabaret do Gláucio in Rio de Janeiro. In March 2026, she will premiere in the Netflix series Emergency Radioactive, directed by Fernando Coimbra.
LITTLE MONEY
It is the story of the friendship between Ondina and Célia, two 73-year-old women, neighbors who began their relationship later in life, after moving into the same apartment building. They lead busy, restless daily lives at an age when most people fear boredom, death, and the possibility that nothing new will ever happen again. Both women are at decisive moments: Ondina is an actress whose financial life is in chaos (on top of that, her dog, Grandma , has died); Célia worked as a manager at an appliance store and secured a comfortable retirement — yet she carries patches of melancholy on her body and is gradually losing her hearing.
The novel explores loneliness, the difficulty of forming bonds after one’s formative years, the aging of women, the choice of whether or not to have children, theatre, and the effort of sustaining a life rooted in the present moment. This last aspect is also reflected in the book’s form: there are no flashbacks — a way of asserting that we are all young in the face of novelty.

Status/Publication: To be published by Fósforo (Brazil) in 2026.
A SKY ACROSS THE FACE
Set during a wake, A SKY ACROSS THE FACE unfolds around the body of Marília, a woman who died before the time. Two women orbit her corpse: Laura, her daughter, and Carmelita, her mother. Laura, a young necro-makeup artist, decides to prepare her own mother’s body in front of the family. To her, this gesture feels like a fairer ritual than standing still, greeting mourners, while her mother lies dead. Carmelita, seventy-two years old, is catatonic. Watching her granddaughter apply makeup to her daughter’s body returns her to a chain of memories, becoming an attempt to face this new stage of life — old age. The tangled thoughts of these two women form both a retreat and a leap: a movement backward that allows the creation of a future.
Bound by maternity yet separated by generations, they are drawn into an intimate confrontation with memory, grief, and the ancestry that runs through the women of the same family. A SKY ACROSS THE FACE surprises the reader with an engaging story, capable of making one laugh and cry through its dramatic, fast-moving narrative, with sharp humor and courageous irreverence in its approach to maternity. A finalist to the Jabuti Prize of best debut novel in 2023.

Publication/Status: Published by Nau (Brazil) in 2022. [92 pages]
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