Ana Paula Tavares was announced the winner of the Prêmio Camões 2025 in Lisbon, Portugal, on Thursday, October 8, 2025.
The Camões Prize, named after Luís de Camões, the Portuguese language’s greatest poet, is the most important prize for literature in the Portuguese language. It is awarded annually by the Portuguese Direção-Geral do Livro, dos Arquivos e das Bibliotecas (National Book, Archive and Libraries Department) and the Brazilian Fundação Biblioteca Nacional (National Library Foundation) to the author of an outstanding oeuvre of work written in Portuguese. The monetary award is €100,000, making it one of the richest literary prizes in the world. Some of the previous winners of the award have been José Craveirinha, Mia Couto, and Germano Almeida. In 2021, Mozambican writer Paulina Chiziane was conferred the award.
The 2025 jury was made up of José Carlos Seabra Pereira, professor at the University of Coimbra (Portugal); Ana Mafalda Leite, professor at the University of Lisbon (Portugal), poet and essayist; Francisco Noa, professor at Eduardo Mondlane University (Mozambique); Lucia Santaella, professor and researcher at PUC-SP (Brazil); Arno Wehling, historian, lawyer and member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters; and Lopito Feijó, writer and literary critic (Angola). They announced the winner as Ana Paula Tavares, making her the first Angolan to receive the honour.
According to the jury, the award was granted to Ana Paula Tavares, “distinguishing her fruitful and coherent trajectory of aesthetic creation and, in particular, her rescue of the dignity of Poetry” and added “with the diction of her lyricism without evasive concessions and with the free commitments of production in chronicles and narrative fiction, Ana Paula Tavares’ work also gains a relevant anthropological dimension in a historical perspective.”
Between poetry, chronicles, and novels, Ana Paula Tavares has published more than ten books, with titles such as Ritos de Passagem (1985), O Lago da Lua (1999), A Cabeça de Salomé (2004), and Um rio preso nas mãos (2019). Her works are featured in anthologies published in Portugal, Brazil, France, Germany, Spain, and Sweden.
She is a Doctor of Anthropology of History from the Nova University of Lisbon (2010), Master of Brazilian Literature and African Literature of the Portuguese Language from the University of Lisbon (1996) and Bachelor and Bachelor of Science in History from the University de Lisbon (1982). She is a guest professor at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, and at the University of Agostinho Neto, in Luanda, Angola.
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