As announced Monday (September 2), Mozambique’s Mia Couto is the first African author to win the book fair’s annual US$150,000 Romance Languages Award, while Mexico’s Ruperta Bautista Vázquez wins the Indigenous Literatures of the Americas Prize for her poetry collection in the Tzotzil language.

Couto’s Romance Languages Award

The Romance Languages Award is conferred in honor of a body of work Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Italian, French or Romanian.

Mia Couto

Not only is Couto the first African winner of this accolade but he’s also the fifth author writing in Portuguese to be chosen, her predecessors being Lídia Jorge (2020); António Lobo Antunes (2008); Rubem Fonseca (2003); and Nélida Piñón (1995).

At Monday’s news conference in Guadalajara, Couto accepted the award from Maputo through a video link. The 2013 recipient of Portugal’s Premio Camões, Couto is also the 1995 winner of Mozambique’s national literature, and he told reporters that his stories and novels stem from his work as a journalist—a desire “to prevent history being erased.”

The award’s jury was chaired by Portuguese academic and literary critic Carlos Reis, who at Monday’s event described the prize as acknowledging Couto’s literary work for “linguistic innovation that makes us rethink the relationship between the community of Portuguese-speaking countries and generates a sensibility toward the African continent and its historical, cultural, and geopolitical relations.” This, he said, “invites us to acknowledge and approach differently the history and nature of this planet.”

With Reis, the Romance Languages Award jury comprised Graciela Montaldo (Argentina); Jerónimo Pizarro (Colombia); Juan Luis Cebrián (Spain); Lucía Melgar (Mexico); Oana Fotache Dubălaru (Romania); and Vittoria Borsò (Germany).

In his acceptance commentary, Couto reiterated the importance of his work as a journalist in his development as a poet, short-story writer, and novelist. That early work served as “a school of human knowledge and of learning how to be a writer,” he said. “It was journalism that gave me the ability to get close to people and to create characters.”

Couto added that his writing has sought to portray “how Africa seeks to represent its identity, its universality, and its diversity,” Couto, who was a guest of the Guadalajara book fair in 2018, will receive the award on November, the fair’s opening day.

Bautista Vázquez’s Indigenous Literatures Prize

The fair’s prize-winner in Indigenous Literatures was announced on August 17, and Ruperta Bautista Vázquez will be awarded the Indigenous Literatures of the Americas Prize for her poetry collection Presagio lóbrego (Dark Foreboding). That work is written in Tzotzil, an Indigenous Maya language spoken in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas.

This is the 12th iteration of the award, which this year drew 47 entries from seven countries, with work written in eight languages.

The Indigenous Literatures Prize carries a purse of 300,000 Mexican pesos (US$15,083) as well as bilingual publication in Tzotzil and Spanish of the  winning work.

Bautista Vázquez is a published playwright, teacher, and translator, and has translated works by Spanish poet Federico García Lorca into Tzotzil, while her own works have been translated into English, French, German, Italian, and other languages.

Her winning poetry collection focuses on the recent surge in violence in her native Chiapas, particularly hostility targeting women. Thousands of villagers have been displaced and September’s return to the schoolyear’s classes has been delayed in a number of towns and villages amid security concerns.

Bautista Vázquez has written that her fifth poetry collection, “expresses the pain, the sense of being orphaned, and the grief and despondency of seeing how the lives of those who say goodbye to this world are unraveling.” She has dedicated her forthcoming book to “those women who left us their legacy in community demonstrations.”

With a woman, the National Regeneration Movement’s Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, poised to assume Mexico’s presidency in October, Bautista Vázquez said, “We know we live in a discriminatory country, where women suffer the most discrimination and where there is less willingness and possibility to achieve our literary, scientific, and research activities. The fact that an Indigenous woman can carry out these types of activities is a sign of great effort.”

The chair of the Indigenous Literatures jury, Mexico’s Angélica Ortiz López—whose native language is Wixárica (Huichol)—said the winning work, “shows the vitality of its original language and recreates elements of its culture, expressing s contemporary concern about the death of elderly men and women that threatens the continuity of that wisdom.”

News conference attendees at Guadalajara International Book Fair’s announcement of its 2024 Romance- and Indigenous Languages honors. Image: Guadalajara FIL, Bernardo de Niz

More from Publishing Perspectives on the Guadalajara International Book Fair is here, more on the Mexican publishing market is here, more on publishing issues in Latin America is here, more on international publishing and book awards is here, and more on world publishing’s trade shows and book fairs is here.