Luís Filipe Castro Mendes wins Poetry Grand Prize
The Teixeira de Pascoaes APE/Amarante Municipality 2018/2019 Grand Prize of Poetry was unanimously awarded by the jury, which highlighted the revisitation and renewal of classic forms, elegy, and sonnet and, in particular, the relationship with the Camonian tradition.
The jury, made up of professors, researchers and writers Clara Rocha, Isabel Cristina Mateus, and José Tolentino Mendonça, also valued the dialogical game with the authors of the western cultural canon, as well as the intercultural bridge with the East and Brazil.
The work “Poemas reunidos”, published in 2018 by Assírio & Alvim, presents the complete poetry of Luís Filipe Castro Mendes revisited by the author, who suppressed some poems and worked on others.
The APE’s Teixeira de Pascoaes Poetry Grand Prix, of a biennial nature, sponsored by the Amarante City Council and a monetary value of 12,500 euros, admitted to the competition complete works of poetry or poetic anthologies of the author published in the years 2018 and 2019, in Portuguese and by Portuguese author.
Luís Filipe Castro Mendes was born in 1950, collaborated with the newspaper Diário de Lisboa-Juvenil, especially between 1965 and 1967, graduated in Law from the University of Lisbon, having developed, since 1975, a diplomatic career, successively in Luanda, Madrid and Paris.
Framed in a post-modernist aesthetic, the work of Luís Filipe de Castro Mendes reveals an enigmatic universe, where pretense and sincerity, the romantic and the classic, the rule and the game are present.
It was premiered in 1983 with the publication of ‘From Recados’, a work in which it problematizes the relationship between the subject and reality and the relationship between the self and the other.
