The “Grande Prémio da Literatura Portuguesa na Diáspora,” promoted by the UK-based newspaper As Notícias, seeks to recognize Portuguese writers living abroad and the literature created between homeland, memory, language and migration

Portuguese literature has never lived exclusively within the geographical boundaries of Portugal. For generations, it has crossed oceans inside suitcases, letters, newspapers, poems and books, accompanying emigrants into new countries while preserving the language of the places they left behind. Now, a new international literary prize seeks to recognize precisely that vast and often insufficiently acknowledged body of writing created beyond Portugal’s borders.

The UK-based Portuguese newspaper As Notícias has launched the inaugural “Grande Prémio da Literatura Portuguesa na Diáspora” — Grand Prize for Portuguese Literature in the Diaspora, an international competition intended to recognize, promote and give greater visibility to literary works written in Portuguese by Portuguese citizens currently residing outside Portugal.

The prize was officially launched on May 5, 2026, as part of the celebrations of World Portuguese Language Day—an especially symbolic date for an initiative built around the idea that a language does not end where a country’s borders end.

Indeed, Portuguese has long been a homeland capable of travelling.

For millions of emigrants and their descendants, it has crossed the Atlantic and the English Channel, settled in cities across Europe, North and South America, Africa and elsewhere, becoming at once inheritance and reinvention. Literature written in the diaspora occupies that complicated and fertile territory: it can remember the country that was left behind while simultaneously interpreting the country in which the writer now lives.

The new prize seeks to give that literature a larger stage.

Prose and Poetry Across Five Continents

The competition is divided into two categories, Prose and Poetry, with registration free of charge and open internationally.

Eligible authors must be Portuguese citizens, at least 18 years old, currently residing outside Portugal. Former emigrants who have since returned and are now resident in Portugal are not eligible.Submitted books must have been published between May 5, 2024, and September 6, 2026. According to the announced regulations, works cannot be simultaneously associated with other competitions or have previously received another literary prize. Applications close on September 6, 2026.

The winner in each category will receive £500, and the works will be evaluated by a jury composed of figures of recognized standing within Portuguese literary and cultural life.

The organizers hope the prize will become an annual cultural reference for Portuguese communities worldwide, encouraging literary creation while reinforcing connections to Portuguese language and culture. But its importance may ultimately extend beyond the monetary award.

As the organizers themselves emphasize, many writers living outside Portugal work far from the major publishing and cultural circuits while nevertheless making substantial contributions to the richness and diversity of literature written in Portuguese. The prize seeks to make some of those voices more visible.

The Literature of Those Who Left

There is something particularly compelling about creating a literary prize specifically for the diaspora because emigration has been one of the great Portuguese experiences of modern history. Millions left. They departed from villages and cities, from Madeira and the Azores, from continental Portugal, carrying with them regional accents, family expressions, recipes, religious traditions, political memories and particular ways of understanding the world.

But they also carried words. From those departures emerged another Portuguese literature: literature written from Newark and Toronto, Paris and London, California and Massachusetts, Luxembourg and Venezuela, Brazil, South Africa, Australia and countless other geographies where Portuguese communities established themselves.

Sometimes that literature looks backward, toward the village, island, street or childhood left behind. Sometimes it looks entirely forward, interrogating identity within the adopted country. And sometimes it exists in the most interesting territory of all: between worlds, belonging completely to neither and therefore capable of seeing both differently. The diaspora writer writes from a hyphen.

And within that hyphen reside questions that have occupied literature for centuries: Who are we after leaving home? What survives migration? What disappears? What does memory preserve—and what does it invent? Can language itself become a country when geography has been lost?

The “Grande Prémio da Literatura Portuguesa na Diáspora” implicitly recognizes that these are not peripheral questions within Portuguese culture. They are part of Portugal’s collective memory.

“More than a literary competition,” the organizers explain, the project intends to give visibility to writers who often remain distant from major publishing networks while contributing significantly to the diversity of Portuguese-language literature.

Memory as a Form of Return

The organizers also situate the initiative within the enormous human history of Portuguese emigration, emphasizing that millions of individual lives constructed abroad form part of Portugal’s collective historical and cultural inheritance.

Writing becomes one way of preserving that inheritance. A poem can preserve what an official archive never recorded. A novel can reconstruct an emigrant kitchen, a factory floor, a first winter in an unfamiliar country, the loneliness of arrival, the Portuguese spoken between parents and children, or the strange experience of returning decades later to discover that both the emigrant and the homeland have changed.

In this sense, diaspora literature does something history alone cannot always accomplish. It gives statistics a human voice.

The inaugural edition will culminate on November 6, 2026, with an awards ceremony in Thetford, England, held in conjunction with the 20th anniversary celebrations of As Notícias. Contestants are expected to attend or be represented at the ceremony.

The initiative is being developed with the collaboration of several Portuguese diaspora media organizations, including Agência Incomparáveis, RádioTV Lusa, Bom Dia, Gazeta Lusófona and LusoJornal, as well as the support of Portugal’s Directorate-General for Consular Affairs and Portuguese Communities (DGACCP).

Applications may be submitted through the prize’s official portal:

Submit an application for the Grande Prémio da Literatura Portuguesa na Diáspora

The complete competition rules are also available online:

Official competition regulations

Additional information about the initiative can be found on the prize’s main website:

Grande Prémio da Literatura Portuguesa na Diáspora

Perhaps the greatest significance of this new prize resides in its very premise: that Portuguese literature is also written elsewhere. It is written by those who left and those who continue to live between memory and distance. It is written in apartments overlooking unfamiliar cities, at kitchen tables thousands of miles from the village of childhood, in countries where Portuguese may be a minority language but remains an intimate geography.

Borders can determine where a writer lives. They cannot determine where a language belongs. And perhaps that is what this new prize ultimately celebrates: a Portugal enlarged by departure—a country whose literary map continues wherever someone, somewhere beyond its shores, sits before a blank page and begins once again to write in Portuguese.

Based on a story in Incomparáveis-news agency. Photos also from the same news agency.