Camões Prize 2022 given to Silviano Santiago

Following on from the meeting of the jury panel for the 34th Edition of the Camões Prize, held on 24 October, the Minister of Culture announced that the Camões Prize 2022 was given to Silviano Santiago.

According to the jury, "Silviano Santiago, in addition to being a writer with literary works worthy of several national and international prizes (Jabuti, Oceanos, etc.), is also a thinker with highly relevant civic and cultural intervention, with a remarkable contribution to projecting Portuguese language as the language for critical thought" in Brazil and beyond (in the Ibero-American, African countries, in the United States, and in Europe)."

On the writer distinguished with the prize, the Minister of Culture notes "the interventive intellectual profile, with an encompassing and wide-reaching vision of what Culture is, materialised in reflections on various fields, from Machado de Assis to cultural studies, Caetano Veloso and tropicalism". For Pedro Adão e Silva, "the Camões prize is a consecration prize and has the merit of fostering interest for Portuguese literature, fostering mutual recognition and encouraging Reading Portuguese-writing authors beyond the borders of the country of origin of the prized author".

 Resume

Silviano Santiago is an essayist, novel writer and storyteller. He was born in Formiga, Minas Gerais, Brazil in 1936.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in Neo-Latin letters from the Minas Gerais Federal University, 1959.

Diplomas of first- and second-year specialisation in French Literature (fellow at CAPES). Centre d`Études Supérieures de Français, Rio de Janeiro, 1960 and 1961.

PhD in French letters from Paris University (Sorbonne) in 1968, with a thesis on André Gide’s The Counterfeiters.

Silviano Santiago has been awarded several prizes, of which we note Jabuti 2017, the Oceanos prize in 2015, and runner up for the Oceanos Prize in 2017.