Frederico Pedreira and Dejan Tiago Stankovic win European literary prize
Frederico Pedreira was born in 1983, published several books of prose and poetry, and translated poets such as WB Yeats and Louise Glück, as well as essays by GK Chesterton and George Orwell, or novels by Dickens, Swift, Wells, Hardy and Banville, among others.
In 2016, he won the INCM/Vasco Graça Moura Prize in the Essay category, with “Uma Aproximação à Estranheza”.
The other Portuguese authors who were nominated for this year’s edition of the European Union Literature Prize were Ana Margarida de Carvalho, with the novel “The gesture we make to protect the head”, Isabel Rio Novo, with “Rua de Paris em dia of rain”, and João Pinto Coelho, with the title “A time to pretend”, all published last year.
The remaining winners this year, announced online, were Tom Kuka, from Albania, Aram Pachyan, from Armenia, Georgi Bardarov, from Bulgaria, Lucie Faulerová, from the Czech Republic, Sigrún Pálsdóttir, from Iceland, Laura Vinogradova, from Latvia, Lara Calleja, from Malta, Gerda Blees, from the Netherlands, Dejan Tiago Stankovic, from Serbia, Anja Mugerli, from Slovenia, Maxim Grigoriev, from Sweden, and Amine Al Ghozzi, from Tunisia.
Dejan Tiago Stankovic, of Serbian nationality, was born in Belgrade, but moved to Portugal in 1996 and became Portuguese. He currently lives in Lisbon and spends seasons in Belgrade.
He translates and writes in his native Serbo-Croat language as well as in Portuguese and has published in Portugal “Contos de Lisboa”, published by Prime Books (Estoril) and “Estoril, romance de guerra”, published by Bookbuilders (Lisbon).
Portugal was one of the countries selected for the 2021 edition of the European Union Literature Prize, which in previous editions distinguished Dulce Maria Cardoso, Afonso Cruz and David Machado, according to the organization of the prize.
The national jury was constituted by José Manuel Lello, administrator of Livraria Lello, in Porto, who presided, and also by the writer José Jorge Letria, president of the Portuguese Society of Authors, by the writer João de Melo, by the journalist Isabel Lucas and also by the writer David Machado, who won the award in 2015 with “Average Happiness Index”.
The European Union Literature Prize was created in 2009 by the European Commission and is funded by the Creative Europe program.
The award is aimed at emerging European writers, with the aim of valuing European literature and disseminating it to the rest of the world, as well as highlighting the creativity and diverse richness of this contemporary literature in the field of fiction, and promoting the circulation of works and authors.
The prize contest is open to the 41 countries currently covered by the Creative Europe program, but as this contest is organized in three-year cycles, each year the organization selects a set of countries corresponding to one third of the total participants.
