Brazilian National Library Literary Prizes


The Brazilian National Library Foundation Literary Prizes, also called Prêmio Literário Biblioteca Nacional aim to recognize the intellectual quality of works published in Brazil. The awards are organized by the National Library Foundation and the first edition took place in 1995.

History

In 1995, the first awarding of the then-called Brazilian Literature and Book Incentive Awards took place, with a total of seven Brazilian authors awarded in the categories of novel, short story, social essay, poetry, literary essay, translation and graphic artist, each named in honor of a representative in their field, respectively Machado de Assis, Artur de Azevedo, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, Alphonsus de Guimaraens, Mário de Andrade, Paulo Rónai and Aloísio Magalhães.
In 1998, the Aloísio Magalhães Award began to be formally defined as an award given to graphic design. The following year, the Machado de Assis Prize began to include novels and short stories, thus discontinuing the Artur de Azevedo Prize.
In 2003, there was no award, and the following year, all the awards were combined into one, called the National Library Foundation Award, for the best book of the year. In 2005, however, all the awards that had existed until 2002 returned to being awarded individually, with two changes: the Machado de Assis Award returned to being exclusively for novels, and the Clarice Lispector Award for short stories was created.
In 2007, on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of the National Library Foundation's Reading Incentive Program, a prize for children's and young people's literature was created, named in honor of Glória Pondé. In 2012, this award began to focus solely on young people's literature, and a separate award for children's literature was created, named in honor of Sylvia Orthof.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Aloísio Magalhães Award was not awarded between 2020 and 2022. Evaluating entries in the graphic design category would have required receiving physical copies and then sending them to the judging committee. This would have been impossible due to the implementation of a remote work regime at the National Library. The other categories were maintained because entries could be submitted entirely online.
In 2023, the Akuli Prize was created, focusing on stories from the oral traditions of Indigenous, Quilombola, and riverside communities. The prize is named after Akuli Taurepang, a young sage from the Arekuná tribe and a storyteller of ancestral stories. He was responsible for transmitting the story of Makunaímã to the German scientist Theodor Koch-Grünberg, who later became instrumental in Mário de Andrade's work Macunaíma.
During the 2023 awards ceremony, the president of the National Library Foundation, Marco Lucchesi, announced the creation of two new awards for the following year: illustration and comics, whose names pay homage, respectively, to Carybé and Adolfo Aizen.

Categories

Source:

Discontinued

  • Short story, from 1995 to 1998
  • Bookod the year, in 2004