Gonçalo M. Tavares Wins Formentor Prize for Literature

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE—

We are honored to announce that Gonçalo M. Tavares—novelist, playwright, poet and longtime Dalkey Archive Press author of such contemporary classics as the Jerusalem and A Voyage to India—has won the 2026 Formentor Prize for Literature.

Tavares was unanimously selected by the jury for an oeuvre “revealing the unexpected implications of a humanity frightened of itself, for recounting the paradoxical epic of contemporary disorientation, and for the audacity with which he has constructed a narrative free from the temptations of the obvious.” Read the full announcement from the Fundación Formentor here.

The Formentor Prize was first awarded in 1961 and has, in recent years, become an important prelude to the Nobel Prize in Literature. Past winners include César Aira, Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, Jorge Luis Borges, Mircea Cărtărescu, Hélène Cixous, Annie Ernaux, Carols Fuentes, Witold Gombrowicz, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Javier Marías, Ricardo Piglia, Nathalie Sarraute, and Enrique Vila-Matas. Tavares is the first Portuguese writer to receive the prize.

Tavares’s work has been translated into more than fifty languages, making him the third most translated Portuguese author of all time, after Fernando Pessoa and José María Eza de Queiroz. Dalkey Archive Press has had the pleasure of publishing four novels of his magisterial “Kingdom” cycle—Klaus Klump: A Man (trans. Rhett McNeill), Joseph Walser’s Machine (trans. Rhett McNeill), Jerusalem (trans. Anna Kushner), and Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique (trans. Daniel Hahn)—as well as the long poem A Voyage to India (trans. Rhett McNeill) and, most recently, A Girl Is Lost in Her Century, Looking for Her Father (trans. Daniel Hahn).

We at Deep Vellum and Dalkey Archive Press are delighted to congratulate Gonçalo M. Tavares on his enormous achievement, and we hope that this recognition will continue to spread awareness of and appreciation for his astounding body of work throughout the Anglophone world.