The writer AM Pires Cabral won the João de Deus National Literary Prize | Poesia 2021, with his work “Frentes de Fogo” (Ink from China Editions), announced this Friday, January 7, the Câmara de Silves, which organizes this contest.
The jury, made up of José António Gomes, Catherine Dumas and Violante Magalhães, decided, by majority, to contemplate the poetic work of the Trás-os-Montes writer, stressing that he «brings a consolidated voice, with its own poetic, critical and simultaneously self-ironic voice. In these poems, the wisdom that comes from “From useless age” and the courageous resistance to the “spirit of the time” and the dominant thought echo in a melancholy, but no less hopeful way. With exquisite rigor in the composition and in the harmony between sound and meaning, memory and writing, life and death, the local and the universal intersect».
The Portuguese author will receive a prize worth €10, which will be given to him at a ceremony scheduled for March 8, as part of the commemorations of the 192nd anniversary of the birth of João de Deus, in São Bartolomeu de Messines.
The João de Deus National Literary Prize | Poesia da Câmara de Silves, which had its first edition in 2021, will biennially award a published work by a Portuguese author, with the aim of «honoring the memory of the distinguished Poet João de Deus, an excellent representative of national culture, as well as the promotion and encouragement of literary productions in the Portuguese language».
The municipality, through Rosa Palma, the mayor, «welcomes the award of the prize to a production of high poetic and literary level, which crosses mundane elements with the wisdom of life, revealing a writer with a recognized career, of great maturity and with multifaceted experience in different literary genres, also highlighting the high number of works proposed for competition and the undeniable poetic quality of many of these creations».
AM Pires Cabral was born in Chacim, Macedo de Cavaleiros, in 1941. He graduated in Germanic Philology. He was a professor 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 Camillian Journeys of Vila Real.
He is known above all as a fiction writer and poet. In the field of fiction, he has so far published eight books of short stories and six novels, having won the Círculo de Leitores Award (with Sancyril), the Camilo Castelo Branco Short Story Grand Prix (with The Erymanthian Pig) and the DST Grand Prize for Literature (with The Canon).
In the field of poetry, he debuted in 1974 with Somewhere in the Northeast and has published 19 titles to date. He was awarded the D. Dinis prizes (with What Train Is This e Douro: Pizzicato and Chula), Luís Miguel Nava (with The Temples of Ash) and PEN Club (with Arado).
It has texts translated into German, Castilian, Catalan, Slovak, French, Hungarian, English and Italian.
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