The Formentor of Letters award is awarded to Gonçalo M. Tavares

Madrid. The Portuguese novelist, poet and playwright Gonçalo M. Tavares was recognized with the prestigious Formentor de las Letras 2026 award, joining a select list of authors who have received this distinction, among which are some of the prominent creators of current literature, such as the Frenchman Pascual Quignard, the Hungarian and most recent Nobel Prize in Literature, László Krasznahorkai, and the Russian Lyudmila Ulitskaya. The jury unanimously chose him and recognized in his work a “powerful personality, dazzling originality and vigorous imagination” with which he reveals “the paradoxical epic of contemporary loss.”

The Formentor Prize began its journey in 1961 and was awarded continuously until 1967, when it was suspended for a time. In that first stage, the work of writers such as Juan García Hortelano, Dacia Mariani, Jorge Luis Borges, Saul Below and Jorge Semprún stood out. In 2011 it was decided to resume the award, promoted by the figure of one of the great Spanish writers of the 20th century, Javier Marías, and since then the list of chosen authors is also dazzling: Carlos Fuentes, Juan Goytisolo, Javier Marías himself, Enrique Vila Matas, Ricardo Piglia, Roberto Calasso, Annie Ernaux, Cees Nooteboom, César Aira and Hélène Cixous, among others.

In this year’s edition the jury was made up of Elide Pittarello, Gerald Martin, Sonia Hernández, Pilar del Río and Basilio Baltasar, who unanimously chose Tavares. At the recognition ceremony they explained their decision: “For revealing the unexpected implications of a humanity afraid of itself, for telling the paradoxical epic of contemporary loss, for the daring with which it has constructed a narrative foreign to the temptations of obviousness.” Furthermore, they warn that “diluting the strict boundaries that separate traditional genres, Tavares has sustained over the last 25 years a literary work of powerful personality, dazzling originality and vigorous imagination.”

Likewise, they agree that “his fictional work embraces characters whose extravagance can be attributed to the most unusual, strange and unexpected dimensions of the human condition. One of the merits attributed to Tavares has been to give form, presence and voice to what culture would prefer to omit. In this way he has allowed the lucidity of a decisive liberating exorcism.”

The jury also explains that “Tavares’ narrative scenarios evoke the gloom that shadows the soul of human beings and, at the same time, the exhaustion of a story that seeks in his texts the possibility of redemption. The mystery of pain and the brilliance of desires collide in his fictions like the outbreak of an arcana announced and never consummated. Portraying the violence masked by psychological, moral and mechanical conventions, Tavares offers his time the possibility to understand the remote origin of the disturbances, conflicts and tragedies that devastate human beings.”

Reverse of reality

Tavares, they add, “belongs to the literary genealogy dedicated to telling the reverse side of reality. With the creative energy of a language capable of dilating the latent meanings of the world, Tavares thus resumes the true narrative tradition and makes this heritage a tribute to his ancestors. For all this, for enriching with his work the school of great literature, for following the trace of the narrative disorder of existence and evoking the parabolic allegory of the universal enigma, the jury awards Gonçalo M. Tavares receives the 2026 Formentor of Letters Award.”

The Portuguese author was born in Luanda (Angola) in 1970 and spent his childhood in the north of Portugal. His training is multidisciplinary, he studied physics, sports and art before dedicating himself to teaching. He is currently a professor of theory of science and epistemology at the University of Lisbon. Since its first publication, in 2001, with Dance bookhas built a vast and powerful work that has been translated into more than 50 languages ​​and published in nearly 70 countries. He is the third most translated Portuguese author, after Fernando Pessoa and Eça de Queiroz, with 226 publications worldwide.

Among his extensive production, long-term projects stand out, for example the cycle of novels known as The Kingdom –which includes the fundamental titles Jerusalem y Learning to pray in the age of technology–, the series of short fictions The neighborhood and the monumental epic A trip to India.

His most recent published book is a satirical and dystopian work titled The End of the United States of America.