“Resuscitar Mammotes” won the best prose book award and “Longarinas” won the best poetry book award
Resurrecting the mammoths (Autêntica Contemporânea) is the best prose book published in Portuguese-speaking countries in 2024, according to the jury of Oceans Prize 2025. The romance of São Paulo Silvana Tavano it replaced the works of authors such as Mia Couto and José Eduardo Agualusa. The announcement was made on the night of this Tuesday 9, during a ceremony at the Mario de Andrade Library, which also awarded Spars (7 letters), from Alagoas Ana Maria Vasconcelos like the best book of poetry.
In competition with authors from several Portuguese-speaking countries, the Brazilian women each win R$150,000.
Silvana Tavano was born in 1957, is a journalist and published a few children’s books before starting in adult literature with The last Saturday in July dawns quietlyalso published by Autêntica Contemporânea. Resurrecting the mammoths part of the bond between a mother and her daughter to evoke time, memory and family ties. The narrator, a mature woman, revisits the events of her life in dialogue with scientific discoveries and existential concerns.
The result is, according to the jury, “a story that imaginatively and movingly addresses the possibilities of managing time, redeeming and modifying the past (and therefore the future) through imagination.” Silvana was also a finalist for the São Paulo Literature Prize 2025, in the Best Novel category, and a semi-finalist for the Jabuti 2025, in the Literary Romance category.
Excited, Silvana Tavano said she did not expect this price. “I didn’t allow myself to dream about it. I was already happy to be among the finalists. I have no words,” she said. The author was grateful for the support of her publisher, who had “the courage to publish an author who had only written children’s books.” “It was very difficult to publish my first novel. It was Autêntica that opened the way for me.”
Already Spars (7 Letters) is the 4th book by Ana Maria Vasconcelos, born in 1988. It brings together poems that explore architectural and bodily images.
The work “favors the short form to deal with the passage of time and permanence; a poetry organized around the minimum and observation”, explained the curator of Oceanos no Brasil, Manuel da Costa Pinto. The poet from Alagoas was a semi-finalist at Oceanos 2024, with the book The face is a watery machine (Land crafts).
Ana Maria, also very emotional, said that, like Silvana, she did not expect to win. And he remembered the happy coincidence of his victory on the day Clarice Lispector was remembered on her death anniversary. “It’s thanks to her that I started writing,” he revealed.
The Oceanos finalists were selected from 3,142 competitors from 488 publishers, with representatives from Angola, Mozambique and Portugal, in addition to Brazil. They went through three stages of qualification and were read and evaluated by three juries made up of experts from three continents, until reaching the two winners.
This is the third year that the Oceanos Prize (born as the Portugal Telecom Prize) is divided into prose and poetry. Previously, Oceanos, organized by Associação Oceanos and Oceanos Cultura, with the support of Itaú Cultural, did not discriminate between genders.
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