Ana Paula Tavares says that Camões is not read and is little known in Angola

"No , Camões is not studied, is not read and is little known, except through the interest of one or another teacher and the interest of one or another young person", said the Angolan writer and teacher, at Folio, the Óbidos International Literary Festival, where today she participated in a conversation on the theme 'The borders of Camões or Camões without Borders'.

The Camões Prize winner says that the lack of knowledge of Camões' work in Angola is due to "a very big change in the preparation and selection of school textbooks" in the country, which favored Angolan authors and left out the works of the Portuguese writer.

"Angola had just become independent and it was necessary to create, let's say, an Angolan, African identity and, therefore, what was invested in in those early days was knowledge of Angolan authors and African authors."

This change "brought many other authors into school curricula, created a great distance from Camões, but also a great distance from Luandino Vieira, António Jacinto, António Cardoso", Angolan writers who "had really created Angolan literature" and in whose work the writer finds some influences from the Portuguese author.

Luandino Vieira "has his readings of Camões in several of his stories, his very particular readings of Camões, as he has of Shakespeare, as he has of Cervantes", which allowed, in his work, "the Portuguese language to be soaked in other national languages", said Ana Paula Tavares.

An opinion, in Óbidos, also shared by the writers Orlando Piedade, from São Tomé and Príncipe, and José Luíz Tavares, also responsible for translating Camões' poems into the Cape Verdean language.

The two writers testified at the session that Camões is not studied in their countries, but they still consider him to be a writer "without borders" and that there is a lot of Camões poetry spread throughout Portuguese-speaking countries.

Ana Paula Tavares, announced just over a week ago as the winner of the 2025 Camões Prize, holds a PhD in Anthropology of History from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa and a master's degree in Brazilian Literature and African Literature in Portuguese from the University of Lisbon, where she graduated in History and where she is currently a professor at the Faculty of Arts.

His works include 'Rites of Passage', 'The Blood of Bougainvillea' and 'Manual for Desperate Lovers'.

The Folio, which is in its 10th edition until Sunday, in Óbidos, features three Nobel Prize for Literature laureates this year, including South African JM Coetzee, awarded in 2003, who will be taking part in a conversation with the public tonight.

Belarusian writer and journalist Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature, was in Óbidos last weekend, and this year's laureate, László Krasznahorkai, will participate in the festival next Sunday.

Organized by the municipality of Óbidos, in partnership with the municipal company Óbidos Criativa, Ler Devagar and the Inatel Foundation, the Fólio has been held since 2015 in the town classified as a Creative City of Literature by UNESCO.

Read Also: Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa congratulates Ana Paula Tavares on the Camões Prize