Luis Quintais has secured his second PEN Poetry Award, having previously received the accolade in 2015 for his poetic work ‘O Vidro’.
The jury, consisting of António Apolinário Lourenço, Graça Capinha, and Paula Cristina Costa, recognized the work for its “particular aesthetic qualities reflected in the construction of a unique poetic language, challenging, occasionally cruel, inhabited by nocturnal gestures and indistinct murmurs, with which it questions the humanity of the human, critically oscillating between agonistic, ironic, and aphoristic tones in the characterization of the modern world.”
“The coherence of Luís Quintais’ poetic trajectory, without yielding to stylistic ease or verbal pyrotechnics, falsely understood as an approach to the reader’s expectation, underpinned the jury’s unanimous decision,” explains Leonor Duarte de Almeida, president of Clube PEN Portugal, in a statement.
Born in 1968 in Angola, Luís Quintais is an anthropologist, poet, and essayist, teaching in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Coimbra.
His poetic works include titles such as ‘A Imprecisa Melancolia’ (1995), ‘Lamento’ (1999), ‘Úmbria’ (1999), ‘Verso Antigo’ (2001), ‘Angst’ (2002), and ‘Duelo’ (2004).
The complete poetry collection ‘Arrancar Penas a Um Canto de Cisne’ won the Teixeira de Pascoaes APE/C.M. de Amarante Grand Poetry Prize 2015-2016.
As an anthropologist, Luis Quintais has published essays in various specialized journals on the social and cultural implications of biomedical knowledge, particularly on psychiatry and its contexts. He is currently researching the interactions between biotechnologies, art, and cognition.
