Naomi Duarte took the top prize in the annual Short Story Competition earlier this week with a piece entitled ‘El Cuenco de Castañas’—a brief fiction about memory, nostalgia, and family set in the Upper Town. We caught up with Naomi to speak about her winning piece, what motivates her writing and her use of Llanito…

The story can be read on the GCS website here: https://www.culture.gi/shortstorywinners/

YGTV: How did you react to the news that you had won the top prize in the Short Story Competition?

Naomi Duarte: I was genuinely surprised. Writing is such a private act that, for me, the biggest achievement had already happened long before the award: sitting down with an idea, staying with it through uncertainty and multiple drafts and having the courage to place it in someone else's hands.

There's something deeply satisfying about seeing a piece through from a vague feeling to a finished story. As wonderful as an award is, the real achievement is the writing itself. Then someone reads it. Better still, someone recognises something of themselves within it. I don't think El Cuenco de Castañas was written to arrive at neat answers or even to be "good" in the conventional sense. It was an attempt to sit with contradictions: love and disappointment, ritual and change, sweetness and rot. I hope people bring their own interpretations to it, challenge it, even disagree with it. At this stage in my writing, conversations around the work mean more to me than praise. I've been fortunate enough to receive recognition before, and I'm incredibly grateful for that, but what stays with me are the moments when someone asks a difficult question, offers a different reading, or tells me that a story helped them think about something in a new way. That's when writing feels most alive to me. I feel it’s important that the process doesn’t and shouldn’t end at the award.

YGTV: What were you trying to achieve in El Cuenco de Castañas?

Naomi Duarte: It was a concept I felt compelled to explore. A second part to an initial similar story from another dinner scene. I was interested in memory as a kind of home: a place where love, ritual, disappointment and identity can coexist without cancelling one another out. I often struggle with holding multiple truths at once, with the contradictions and dualities of being human. Writing, like painting, is one of the ways I try to understand that complexity. There's so much superficiality and distraction in everyday life, yet internally we contain entire worlds that often go unexplored. This story was an attempt to unpack one of those worlds.

I also wanted to preserve a memory and examine it closely because one day I may no longer remember it in all its detail. There's an element of grief in that too: an awareness that traditions fade, people leave and certain versions of ourselves disappear with them. Ultimately, the story asks how meaning is made collectively. Do rituals preserve people, or do people preserve rituals? What do the small practices we inherit tell us about who we are? I think literature has the ability to illuminate these pockets of meaning hidden within ordinary life. The ordinary is rarely just ordinary. If we pay close enough attention, it becomes a way of understanding memory, identity and what it means to belong.

YGTV: Your story has some code-switched Llanito. What would you say to someone who has doubts that the language we use every day can be used in short stories and poems for literary expression?

Naomi Duarte: I think everyday language already contains poetry. Llanito reflects the reality of how many of us think, remember and love. To exclude it from literature would be to suggest that our lived experiences aren't worthy of artistic expression. I have pieces of creative writing Llanito from when I was fourteen, long before I knew there were formal categories. Even my degree explored the relationship between visual art and Llanito writing, subverting the concept of translation into amalgamation of linguistic and visual material. It is inseparable to my capacities of creative expression. Literature doesn't only belong to standardised forms of language; it belongs to the voices people actually inhabit. If we want Llanito to be recognised as a living language rather than simply a curiosity, then it needs stories, poems and art. Literature becomes another way of preserving it, testing its possibilities and allowing it to evolve. That happens when people start writing, not solely for competitions but on a whole, writing unapologetically -  the corrections and improvements can come after.

YGTV: Your winning story is in a very lyrical style. Could you say that your story is a prose poem of sorts?

Naomi Duarte: I think it exists somewhere between the two. I'm deeply interested in the musicality and compression of poetry, but I also care about narrative and character. So, while the story borrows the attentiveness of a poem, I still approached it as fiction, one where the emotional movement is subtle rather than plot-driven.

More broadly, I'm interested in what happens when artistic forms overlap. I enjoy blurring boundaries and pushing against the confines of structure. Some ideas ask to become poems, others paintings, stories or performances. I like listening closely enough to discover what form a particular idea requires. And in all honesty, my true ambition is to see those ideas through for as long as I am able.

YGTV: How have your own experiences and memories fed into this story?

Naomi Duarte: The ritual itself comes directly from memory. Eating castañas on Guy Fawkes Night with my family is something I experienced growing up and I feel incredibly grateful to have had a childhood rich in these vivid, communal moments. But memory is never documentary. Lately, I've become interested in taking singular experiences and allowing fiction to transform them, combining moments and placing them in conversation with more universal ideas. For a long time, I struggled with sharing work rooted in personal experience because I feared misinterpretation. But I've actually found a great deal of freedom in that sculpting, you're not preserving the facts so much as preserving the feeling. I always take this quote from Goethe with me when I write which is: "All my works are but fragments of a great confession." I resonate greatly with that.

I'm also intrigued by the idea of taking quintessentially Gibraltarian experiences and reframing them through allegory and parable. I think of stories like the myth of Persephone, where the changing of the seasons becomes a meditation on grief, separation and return; the myth of Icarus, which speaks to ambition, desire and human limitation or Plato's Allegory of the Cave, which transforms an abstract philosophical question into an unforgettable image of perception and truth. I also love the simplicity of Aesop's fables and biblical parables, where ordinary actions reveal something profound about human nature.

Those stories remind us that meaning often hides within the familiar, waiting to be sat with. El Cuenco de Castañas became less about faithfully recreating one evening and more about understanding what that evening taught me about love, disappointment, ritual and belonging.

YGTV: There’s an aphoristic element to your story. What are the risks a writer runs in making their work more philosophical in this way? Is it hard to avoid sounding trite?

Naomi Duarte: Absolutely. The danger is arriving at conclusions too neatly rather than earning those observations through image, character and experience. I’m still learning how to do that and I’m trying to read as much literature as possible. It’s hard to figure that out on your own, which is why writing communities and discussing work is important to me.

But, I honestly don't know how to write any other way, and sometimes I worry that it's a defect. I've always been drawn to writers whose work pauses to think alongside the reader. The challenge is to remain curious rather than certain. I don't want to provide answers as much as create space for questions that continue unfolding after the story ends, after all, life rarely presents itself answers.

YGTV: The story is set in the Upper Town. What does this area of Gibraltar mean to you as a writer? Does it invite literary responses more than other parts of the Rock?

Naomi Duarte: The Upper Town feels incredibly layered to me. I grew up there, so it's inseparable from my understanding of identity and belonging. You're constantly aware of the people and stories that came before you through traditions persisting in small acts of repetition. I don't think it's inherently more literary than anywhere else on the Rock. But I do think Gibraltar is a breeding ground for creative expression to those who are sensitive to it.

YGTV: How does your practice as an artist feed into your work as a writer?

Naomi Duarte: For me, they've always been intertwined. Some of my earliest experiences of storytelling came through illustrated books, where image and text worked together to create meaning. Later, artists like Sophie Calle, Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin showed me that writing itself could become an artistic medium. I recently went to Emin’s show at the TATE Modern in London and she had walls filled with framed diary entries. That was extremely reassuring as an artist, this woman has award-winning, high-valued pieces and yet she chose to show diary entries throughout the year. It also spoke to the way in which artists live their life when they’re not working on standalone pieces. Personally, I try to write every night before bed and early in the mornings on weekends. I'm interested in the conversations between different art forms: visual art, literature, theatre, film, music and fashion. Human beings are multifaceted, so it feels natural that our creative practices should be too. Sometimes an idea wants to become a painting; sometimes it insists on being a poem. Ultimately, all my work is trying to do the same thing: pay attention to what resists easy expression and find the form that allows it to speak.

Pic from left to right: Gibraltar Chronicle Features Editor María Jesús Corrales, Naomi Duarte, and Melissa Bosano, one of the competition judges.