Mariana Villas-Boas is a bilingual fiction writer of short stories, a genre she loves for its demanding nature and opportunity for play.

Born in Lisbon, she was raised in Washington D.C. and has lived in a handful of European countries since.

Early in her literary career, she won the 2014 FNAC New Talent Award for short fiction written in her native Portuguese. She worked quietly for a while, before beginning to send out work again in 2021, this time in English.

She was nominated for the PPXLVIII Pushcart Prize in 2022, longlisted for the 2023 Disquiet Prize, shortlisted for the 2022 Mylsexia Short Story Competition and longlisted for American Short Fiction’s 2022 Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize.

You can find her stories in US literary magazines such as AGNI, American Chordata and Apple Valley Review, as well as European anthologies curated by Essais Agités and Zwischentext (Switzerland), Mslexia (UK) and FNAC (Portugal).

She attended Claire Keegan’s 2024 Writing Retreat (Tullow, Ireland) and the 2025 Tin House Winter Workshop (USA).

Having recently moved to Miami, Mariana is working on a new collection of short fiction.