Gonçalo M. Tavares wins the Formentor Prize for Literature 2026

BarcelonaThe writer, playwright, and poet Gonçalo M. Tavares (Luanda, Angola, 1970), celebrated by critics and readers as one of the great voices of Portuguese and European literature, has won the Formentor Prize for Literature. The jury highlighted that in the last twenty-five years he "has built a literary oeuvre of powerful personality, dazzling originality, and vigorous imagination," which includes more than forty titles. A professor of literature at the University of Lisbon, he debuted in 2001 with the verses of Book of Dance Since then, he has built a prolific and unique body of work, exploring all literary genres, translated into more than fifty languages ​​and published in seventy countries. He is the third most translated Portuguese author, after Fernando Pessoa and José María Eza de Queiroz.

Tavares explained in an interview with ARA that he shuts himself away daily in a studio he calls a "bunker" to write. "I isolate myself from the world for three or four hours at a time," he continued. "I need a long, uninterrupted period of time, with the intention of breaking free from the world's ties. When I'm traveling, I can write poetry or short pieces, but I'm incapable of continuing novels."

Among his extensive output—in Spanish, published mainly by Seix Barral and Literatura Random House—the cycle stands out. The kingdom, which includes the fundamental novels A man: Klaus Klump, Joseph Walser's Machine, Jerusalem (in Catalan, Quid Pro Quo) and Learning to pray in the age of technology; the short fictions of the series The neighborhoodand the parodic counter-epic A trip to India (in Catalan on Periscope), in addition to titles such as A girl is lost in the 20th century (2018) and Bucharest-Budapest: Budapest-Bucharest (Nórdica, 2022). The manifesto-dictionary has also been published in Catalan. Brief notes on literature-Bloom (Periscope). The most recent novel is a dystopian satire, Or we make two United States of America (2025), but the last book published in Spanish is Mateo lost his job (Seix Barral, 2023). "If you want to experience the flavor of a country, don't go / to the exuberant palace / built in the city center. Go / by uncomfortable public transport / towards the outskirts" – he wrote in A trip to India"—in the Catalan version by Pere Comellas—It's advice. But who am I to advise you on public transport?" "Aesthetics are over. Only money remains. / Men are geniuses of good for gold, / geniuses of evil for the landscape."

Since receiving the José Saramago Prize in 2005 from the author himself, who ironically stated that "Gonçalo M. Tavares has no right to write so well at only 35 years old" and that "let them come," Tavares has been receiving international awards. In 2011 he received the European Literary Prize, and in 2021 the Prix Laure Bataillon for his translation ofThe neighborhoodNow the jury awards him the Formentor Prize for "unveiling the unexpected implications of a humanity frightened of itself, for explaining the paradoxical epic of contemporary loss, and for the audacity with which he has constructed a narrative free from the temptations of the obvious."

In his books, Tavares has analyzed the progressive technologization of the world, and his diagnosis is not very optimistic. "The 21st century is the century of technology," he asserts. "However, for me, technological progress does not necessarily imply any kind of human progress. When a new invention arrives, it anticipates its failure. Creating the ship implied shipwreck. The scope of the failure of a sinking ship is different from that of the loss of control over technologies."