The Formentor de las Letras award has returned to the Mallorca hotel that hosted its first literary meetings, with Portuguese novelist Gonçalo M. Tavares receiving this year's prize. The ceremony took place at the remodeled hotel now known as Four Seasons Resort Mallorca at Formentor, on the bay at the cape of Formentor. The jury cited Tavares for exposing the unexpected consequences of a humanity afraid of itself and for narrating the paradoxical epic of contemporary straying.
In his acceptance speech, Tavares praised an award that seeks to remain apart from fashions, passing phenomena and bestseller lists. He said the list of past winners, which includes Jorge Luis Borges, Saul Bellow, Carlos Fuentes and Annie Ernaux, commands respect and honors extraordinary works by writers who were radical and intransigent with their own work. He added that among those names there are no sellers or traders, and that none had negotiated with the public or readers, but had instead followed their private forests toward the imaginary windmills each carried in their head.
The return to Formentor follows a period in which the prize and its conversations were held in places such as Canfranc, Marrakech and Aranjuez, at hotels belonging to the Barceló chain. Basilio Baltasar, the architect of the award's second stage, said the event was returning to the cradle where everything began and recovering the space, the bay and the spirit of the place, where the memory of the classical world is encoded in the landscape. The hotel lies in the protected Serra de Tramuntana, a World Heritage site, and its reconstruction was not free of controversy and protests by environmental groups. The prize had its first stage between 1961 and 1967 and was revived in 2011; this year it celebrates its 16th edition. It had been based at the hotel until 2020, when the property left the Barceló group, before beginning its itinerancy and returning to Pollença six years later.
The Formentor story began with two literary meetings held within ten days in May 1959. The first was an initiative of Camilo José Cela, who promoted the Conversaciones Poéticas at the hotel, attended by figures including Vicente Aleixandre, Robert Graves, Rosario Conde, José Agustín Goytisolo and Carles Riba. The second, the First International Colloquium on the Novel, had poet and editor Carlos Barral as a key figure. Jordi Amat, coordinator of the Babelia supplement and author of a biography of Gabriel Ferrater, recalled that the elite of international publishing gathered at Formentor to discuss literature, in what he described as spiritual and very witty exercises. Juan Goytisolo called the early meetings a 'contubernio' and drew a parallel with the Munich congress of the anti-Franco opposition. In 1961, the Formentor de las Letras prize was created by a group of editors including Barral, Claude Gallimard and Giulio Einaudi. In its first editions it had two branches, one rewarding a career and another an unpublished novel, and it remained active until 1967, when Formentor had become an uncomfortable space for the regime.
In its second life, the format differs from that of the 1960s. Each year the prize is presented within the Conversaciones Literarias, which have a different leitmotif. This year's theme is 'Artists, emulators and copyists.' The first session of the European Editors' Colloquium was held in the hotel's lower floor, with the irruption of artificial intelligence in publishing as a major subject. A session dedicated to the architect Antoni Gaudí is scheduled for Monday. Elena Martínez Bavière, editorial director of Alianza and Cátedra, said the unique space allows the editorial craft to be considered beyond daily urgency, and that when editors from different countries, generations and trajectories sit together, perspectives emerge that would not appear in conversations with the usual colleagues. Writer and biographer Anna Caballé, a three-time member of the prize jury, said she had never seen a place where continent and content, art and nature, were so well fused, and described Formentor as a geographic space inhabited by the myth of respect for and preservation of the highest values of literature.
The award has shown a strong record in recent years. When French writer Annie Ernaux received it in 2019, she was not widely known in Spain; three years later she was awarded the Nobel Prize. Something similar happened with Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, who received the Formentor in 2024 and the Nobel the following year. In the prize's first stage, Samuel Beckett and Saul Bellow also went on to receive the Nobel. Javier Marías, Enrique Vila-Matas, Mircea Cărtărescu and Cees Nooteboom are among the winners of recent years.
Sources: El País Cultura.