© Joana CaianoGonçalo M. Tavares //
We are happy to share that Gonçalo M. Tavares has been awarded the 2026 Formentor Prize for Literature, considered a prelude to the Nobel Prize in Literature.
This prize, which began in 1961 with the distinction of Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges, has in recent years been awarded to authors who, a few years later, received the Nobel Prize, as was very recently the case with Annie Ernaux and László Krasznahorkai.
The impressive list of previous winners includes, among others, Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Saul Bellow, Witold Gombrowicz, Javier Marías, Ricardo Piglia, Roberto Calasso, Mircea Cărtărescu, Annie Ernaux, Cees Nooteboom, César Aira, Liudmila Ulítskaya, Pascal Quignard, and László Krasznahorkai.
The jury praised Tavares’s work “for revealing the unexpected implications of a humanity frightened of itself, for recounting the paradoxical epic of contemporary loss, and for the boldness with which he has constructed a narrative free from the temptations of the obvious. (…) By blurring the strict boundaries that separate traditional literary genres, Tavares has sustained over the past 25 years a body of work marked by a powerful voice, dazzling originality, and vigorous imagination.”
Tavares is the first Portuguese writer to receive this prize, which carries an award of fifty thousand euros.
The Prize was founded by a renowned group of European publishers, including Carlos Barral, Claude Gallimard, Giulio Einaudi, Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt, Barney Rosset and Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
