The 2025 Camões Prize has been awarded to Ana Paula Tavares, announced by the Direção-Geral do Livro, dos Arquivos e das Bibliotecas (DGLAB). The jury highlighted “her fertile and coherent trajectory of aesthetic creation and, particularly, her dignified rescue of poetry.”
“Congratulations to Ana Paula Tavares for receiving the Camões Prize, the most significant award in Lusophone literature,” stated Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa on the official website of the Presidency of the Republic.
The President expressed that the award is “all the more deserved as the Angolan writer, residing in Portugal for three decades, embodies a concrete idea of Lusophony.”
The head of state noted Ana Paula Tavares’s journey not only “as a poet and prose writer” but also “as an academic and researcher” in fields such as African literature, anthropology, museology, or heritage, as well as “her participation in conferences, festivals, and juries, maintaining a constant connection between Portuguese, Brazilian, and African arts and letters.”
“Ana Paula Tavares debuted as a poet in 1985, in a wave of new voices marking a turning point in Angolan poetry, with her complete poems recently published by Caminho,” Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa’s congratulatory note stated.
The Angolan writer “joined the ranks of Craveirinha and Pepetela among Angolan awardees of the Camões Prize, and writers like Sophia de Mello Breyner, Paulina Chiziane, or Adélia Prado,” the note added.
Born in 1952 in Lubango, Ana Paula Tavares holds a Ph.D. in Historical Anthropology from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa and a master’s in Brazilian Literature and African Literatures in Portuguese from the University of Lisbon, where she earned her degree in History and is currently a faculty member in the Faculty of Letters.
She authored ‘Ritos de passagem,’ ‘O Sangue da buganvília,’ and ‘Manual para amantes desesperados,’ among other works.
The Camões Prize for literature in the Portuguese language was established by Portugal and Brazil in 1988 to honor authors “whose work contributes to the projection and recognition of the literary and cultural heritage of the common language,” first awarded in 1989 to Portuguese writer Miguel Torga.
