17/06/2026 - 8:07 GMT+2
Portuguese writer Lídia Jorge has won the 2026 Austrian State Prize for European Literature. The announcement was made on Tuesday in a statement published on the official website of the country’s Ministry of Culture (source in Portuguese).
The prize, first awarded in 1965, goes to the complete literary work of a European author whose writing has achieved significant international recognition and is available in German, through translations, the same press release explains.
In its justification for the choice, the jury said: “Lídia Jorge has for many years been one of the most important voices in Portuguese literature”, with a body of work in which “critique of European colonialism” is presented as a “central theme”, alongside “social inequality and poverty, discrimination against women, racism and the 1974 Carnation Revolution.”
The panellists – Cristina Beretta, Thomas Keul, Thomas Macho, Marlene Streeruwitz and Andrea Zederbauer – also added that in “almost fifty years of her career as a writer” the author “has not only written 13 novels, but also numerous children’s books, short stories, plays, poems and essays”. Over the decades, these works have been “translated into Spanish, French, English and German.”
