The jury for the Grande Prémio de Poesia Gil Vicente 2023/2024 has awarded this distinction to the monumental work of Amadeu Baptista in ‘Danos Patrimoniais.’ This impressive ‘Antologia Pessoal 1982-2022’ serves as a testimony of extraordinary fidelity to Poetry as an engagement with the world and a call to relational life, a quest for knowledge, and a desire for resonance; it fulfills the unique authenticity of a lyrical vocation, related to the intertextual dialogue of elective affinities with the legacy of other poets, according to the jury’s justification released by APE.
The jury comprised Isabel Cristina Rodrigues, José Carlos Seabra Pereira, and José Manuel de Vasconcelos, and the award carries a monetary value of 12,500 euros.
The Grande Prémio de Poesia Gil Vicente aims to distinguish “complete works of poetry or poetic anthologies by Portuguese authors,” as stated in the same communiqué, which adds that this first edition covered publications from 2023 and 2024.
Amadeu Baptista was born in Porto in 1953 and made his debut in book form with ‘As Passagens Secretas’ in 1982, since then receiving several awards.
About ‘Danos Patrimoniais,’ the following was written on the publisher Afrontamento’s website, which published it in 2023: “Marking 40 years of literary activity, this Personal Anthology gathers a collection of poems chosen from all the books I published until 2022, nearly all of them out of print, as well as some scattered pieces that appeared in newspapers, magazines, collective books, and anthologies. The selection criteria, process-wise subjective as with all anthologies, adhered, according to the chronological sequence in which the poems were published, to an affective continuity that I presume can still offer a comprehensive view of what I write.”
