Morais graduated in philosophy from the Faculty of Arts of the University of Lisbon, where she was a student of David Mourão-Ferreira, who she subsequently succeeded as director of Colóquio Letras.

She was appointed director of Colóquio Letras, published by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, in 1996, leaving in controversial circumstances in early 2009.

She continued the practice she had already started of publishing issues on specific topics, such as one on medieval Portuguese literature (142), one devoted to Mourão-Ferreira (145/6), and others on José Saramago (151/2) and Almeida Garrett (153/4).

She received considerable support from people in the Portuguese literary world, who signed an open letter online stressing that the magazine under her directorship had been "a model of imaginative, free and rigorous publication".

At the time of Carrilho's much-publicised separation from his second wife, television personality Bárbara Guimarães, Varela announced that she had suffered physical abuse from her first husband.