The Portuguese Gonçalo M. Tavares has been awarded the Formentor Prize for Letters 2026. The jury has awarded the writer, according to the minutes, “for revealing the unexpected implications of a humanity afraid of itself, for telling the paradoxical epic of contemporary loss, for the audacity with which he has constructed a narrative alien to the temptations of obviousness.”
Tavares has been distinguished for the “powerful personality, dazzling originality and vigorous imagination” of a work that has freely walked, over the last 25 years, the boundaries between literary genres. Born in Luanda, Angola, in 1970, to his credit is a series of books based on other writers such as Mr. Valery, Mr. Henri o Mr. Brecht (all published in Spain by Random House), novels such as Mateo lost his jobA trip to India o the kingdom (in Seix Barral) Bucharest-Budapest: Budapest-Bucharest (Nordic). His vast work has been translated into more than fifty 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. His most recent published book is a satirical and dystopian work titled The End of the United States of America (Relogio D’Agua, Lisbon, 2025).
In addition to his imagination and humor, he is known for his concision, like a language surgeon: “Reading does not consist only of reading a text, but of raising your head, that is where a good part of creation really begins. If the book is very exhaustive, didactic, explanatory, there is nothing left for the reader,” said the author in an interview for in 2016. His order and precision are also highlighted: “For me, internal order is important (…) My father, an engineer, told me how when building houses he spent several months digging to fix the foundations, and it seemed absurd to me, because instead of raising a building upwards he worked downwards, in the opposite direction to the objective. Only four months later he reached the 0th floor and that began to rise. And the foundations are needed first,” he added.
Tavares has a multidisciplinary background, with studies in Physics, Sports and Art, and has dedicated himself to teaching. Currently, he is a professor of Theory of Science and Epistemology at the University of Lisbon, an academic facet that is reflected in his work through a surgical precision in language and a constant exploration of the limits of logic and reason. “His novelistic work embraces characters whose extravagance can be attributed to the most unusual, strange and unexpected dimensions of the human condition,” notes the jury.
The jury was made up of Elide Pittarello, Gerald Martin, Sonia Hernández, Pilar del Río and Basilio Baltasar, who decided unanimously. “The Portuguese writer belongs to the literary genealogy dedicated to telling the other side of reality,” concludes the jury.
In the latest editions of Formentor, Hélène Cixous, Pascal Quignard, Liudmila Ulítskaya and César Aira were highlighted. Two of the winners later became Nobel Prize winners: Annie Ernaux and László Krasznahorkai. The Formentor was founded in 1961 by a group of famous European editors such as Carlos Barral, Claude Gallimard or Giulio Einaudi, and its historical record includes a good handful of those names that appear in literature history manuals: Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, Witold Gombrowicz or Saul Bellow. During the 60s it was an unavoidable editorial and literary forum embodied in the meetings held since the 30s in the Mallorcan enclave that gives it its name.