Welcome to the Official page of the Presidency of the Portuguese Republic

I very warmly thank Her Excellency President Dilma Rousseff for her presence at the award ceremony of the most important Portuguese language reward, the Camões Prize.

Your gesture, Madam President, has a very special significance, which I must emphasize, since it occurs in the National Day of Portugal, which is equally the Day of Camões, the date when we celebrate the universality of the Portuguese Language.

Instituted in the already remote year of 1988 by the Portuguese and Brazilian governments, the Camões Prize aims to distinguish the authors that, through the richness and the value of their works, have contributed to the enrichment of the Portuguese language’s literary and cultural heritage.

Commemorating this year its twenty fifth anniversary, the Camões Prize has been attributed to authors from practically all the Lusitanian universe, from Angola and Mozambique, from Cape Verde, from Brazil, from Portugal.

The first author rewarded with this prize, the writer and poet Miguel Torga, was an emigrate in Brazil during his adolescence. Many years later he would write a book on Portuguese and Brazilian topics. The title could not be more appropriate: “Traço de União”.

Truly, it is a binding line that we celebrate in this National day of Portugal and of the Portuguese Communities.

I congratulate, with friendly admiration, writer Mia Couto, as well as the jury that decided to award him this prize. It was a fair and clear sighted decision.

Holder of a vast work, which stretches across all literary genres, from poetry to short story, comprising chronicles and novels, Mia Couto is one of the better recognized and versatile contemporary Portuguese language authors. With thirty books published, translated in more than twenty countries, he built, throughout his solid career, his own fictional universe, immensely original, which is unique since it brings his characters – and equally his readers – face to face with great issues and the great dilemmas of human existence.

Mia Couto rebuilds the Mozambican time and mode, the traditions and oratory of his birthplace, which was a sleepwalking land and is today one of the most promissory countries in the African Continent. He places in the immense area of the Portuguese language the so very rich heritage of images and sounds, the colours and memories of Mozambique, conceiving new geographies and vast lands where his tales are unravelled. Tales of humanity and freedom.

We could evoke many of Mia Couto’s works, all of them with an unique and dense beauty. I recall a story here, a story for children, where the main character, a child, is able to view the sea thanks to the evocative power of the word. It is the evocative power of the word that we celebrate today, through the award of the Camões Prize.