The jury, consisting of Helena Buescu, José Cândido Oliveira Martins, and Ana Isabel Soares, unanimously awarded the prize in the first round, praising “the courage to recover a certain poetry of thought without the melancholic detour of nostalgia, in an elegant speech worthy of the author’s work.”
“The dialogue that the poet establishes with the dying muse, Erato, develops as between equal workers of the poetic word, equally skilled in handling their differences. It is an elegy stripped of sadness or longing, which skillfully articulates colloquial steps with the elevation of classical verbs,” the jury states in their reasoning.
Poet and novelist A. M. Pires Cabral was born in Chacim, Macedo de Cavaleiros, in 1941, graduated in Germanic Philology, was a teacher and cultural animator, responsible for Vila Real’s participation in the Council of Europe’s Project 5.2 (“Cultural Policies in Cities”), and co-organizer of the Camilianas Conferences in Vila Real.
A. M. Pires Cabral, a winner of several literary awards, has published eight books of short stories and six novels in the fiction area, while in poetry, in which he debuted in 1974, he has published 20 titles to date.
The António Ramos Rosa Poetry Grand Prize, worth 12,500 euros, established by APE and sponsored by the Faro City Council and the Millennium BCP Foundation, aims to annually award a poetry work, in Portuguese, published in full and in first edition.
The António Ramos Rosa Poetry Grand Prize was instituted in 2023 and, in its first edition held last year, distinguished the poet João Luís Barreto Guimarães.
