Literary prizes and institutions

A literature does not live on its authors alone: it also lives on the institutions that consecrate it, fix it, and circulate it. In the Portuguese-speaking world, three things give that function its shape — the prizes, which distinguish; the academies, which standardise; and the bodies of cultural diffusion, which project. Together they map out the literary prestige of a language spoken today by more than two hundred and fifty million people.

The Camões Prize

The Camões Prize is the most important award in Portuguese-language literature. It was established in 1988, by an agreement between the governments of Portugal and Brazil, and first conferred in 1989. It distinguishes not a single work but a whole career: it honours an author for the totality of his or her contribution to the literary and cultural heritage of the shared language.

The jury brings together, by rotation, representatives of the Portuguese-speaking countries, and the prize — currently worth one hundred thousand euros — is jointly administered, in Portugal by the Directorate-General for Books, Archives and Libraries and, in Brazil, by the National Library. Its reach is genuinely intercontinental: its laureates include not only Portuguese and Brazilian writers but African ones too.

The first recipient was Miguel Torga, in 1989. In 1991, José Craveirinha became the first African author to be honoured — a sign that the prize embraced from early on the whole of the Portuguese-speaking world, and not merely the Luso-Brazilian axis that had created it.

The Nobel: the case of Saramago

The Portuguese language has, to this day, a single Nobel Prize in Literature: José Saramago, honoured by the Swedish Academy in 1998. The Academy praised in him the writer who, “with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony”, continually makes an elusive reality apprehensible.

The recognition meant more than the man himself: it confirmed on the world stage the maturity of a literature that, for centuries, had been read mostly within its own linguistic borders. Saramago is, moreover, one of the rare writers to hold both of the language’s greatest honours — the Camões (1995) and the Nobel (1998).

The language academies

If prizes consecrate, the academies fix and standardise. There is no single academy for the entire Portuguese-speaking world; there are national institutions, with long histories and distinct functions.

The oldest is the Lisbon Academy of Sciences (Academia das Ciências de Lisboa), founded in 1779 as the Royal Academy of Sciences. Its Class of Letters is, in Portugal, the reference authority on the language: to it belongs the official lexicographical tradition, embodied in the Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa that bears its name.

In Brazil, the Brazilian Academy of Letters (Academia Brasileira de Letras) was founded in 1897, with the novelist Machado de Assis as its first president. Modelled on the Académie française, it is made up of forty life members — the so-called immortals — each occupying a numbered chair tied to a patron. Among its duties is the publication of the Orthographic Vocabulary of the Portuguese Language, the reference instrument of the Brazilian norm.

Other prizes and the economy of prestige

Below the Camões, a constellation of prizes structures the literary life of each country. The table below gathers some of the most influential.

Prize	Scope	Since	Nature
Camões Prize	Lusophone world	1989	Lifetime
Pessoa Prize	Portugal	1987	Body of work
Grand Prize for the Novel (APE)	Portugal	1982	Novel of the year
José Saramago Prize	Lusophone world	1999	Young author
Oceanos Prize	Lusophone world	2003	Book of the year

The Pessoa Prize, created in 1987, annually distinguishes a figure of Portuguese culture, not exclusively a literary one. The José Saramago Prize, established in 1999 by the Círculo de Leitores Foundation, rewards younger authors across the whole language, having revealed names that would go on to prominence, such as José Luís Peixoto and Gonçalo M. Tavares.

Diffusion: projecting the language

Internal consecration is completed by external diffusion. In Portugal, the Camões Institute ensures the teaching and promotion of Portuguese language and culture abroad; at the multilateral level, the International Institute of the Portuguese Language (IILP), a body of the CPLP based in Praia, Cape Verde, coordinates shared policy. Prizes, academies and diffusion bodies thus form a single system: to distinguish authors, to fix the norm, and to carry both out into the world.