Angolan writer Pepetela is, with His Excellency, Present Body(Don Quixote, 2018), the winner of the Casino Literary Prize of Póvoa do Correntes d’Escritas 2020. The announcement was made this morning at the official opening ceremony of the festival that brings together Iberian-speaking writers in Póvoa de Varzim.
The delivery of the prize, worth 20 thousand euros, will take place in the closing session of the festival, next Saturday, at 6 pm, but the writer has already announced that he will not be able to be present, as he has recently been operated on. “Ua minor intervention, but necessary ”, he explained in a message he sent and was read at the ceremony. “I am not yet free to travel, nor to make any additional physical effort, as you will certainly understand”, revealed the writer. It will therefore be a representative of the publisher Don Quixote to receive the award for the writer.
It was unanimously that the jury made up of Ana Daniela Soares, Carlos Quiroga, Isabel Pires de Lima, Paulo Mendes Coelho and Valter Hugo Mãe awarded the prize to Pepetela, highlighting “the originality of the effective narrative stratagem to irony denounce a history of nepotism and abuse of power typical of totalitarian systems “and manifesting himself” sensitive to the anticipatory dimension of the author’s fiction, which establishes strong points of contact with the current reality “.
The first Casino da Póvoa Literary Prize was awarded in 2004 to Lídia Jorge, for the novel The Wind Whistling on Cranes. Distinguishing poetry and prose in an alternate way, he counts among his award winners Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Maria Velho da Costa, Pedro Tamen, Rubem Fonseca, Hélia Correia, Fernando Echevarría, Javier Cerca and Ana Luísa Amaral, among other authors.
