The INCM Portuguese Language Prizes close on 31 July, with 35,000 euros on the table
Entries for the 2026 INCM Prizes for the Portuguese Language close on 31 July. Seven prizes, 5,000 euros each, publication by Imprensa Nacional and one award built for the diaspora.
Apply / Learn moreIf there is an unpublished manuscript in your drawer, you have two days. Entries for the 2026 INCM Prizes for the Portuguese Language close on 31 July, and what sits on the other side is not symbolic: 35,000 euros split across seven prizes at 5,000 euros each, plus publication of at least seven previously unpublished works by Imprensa Nacional.
Entries are electronic only, through the forms on the Imprensa Nacional site, which also carries the rules and jury composition for each award. Winners are announced by the end of 2026.
What are the INCM Portuguese Language Prizes?
There are seven, each with a different way in. The INCM Vasco Graça Moura Prize rotates between poetry, essay writing in the humanities and translation of public-domain works — for 2026, translation is the open category. The Arnaldo França Prize, created with Cape Verde’s national press, recognises prose by Cape Verdean citizens or anyone resident there for at least five years, while the Manuel Lopes Prize rewards children’s and young-adult writing and illustration, also in Cape Verde.
Then come the INCM Eugénio Lisboa Prize for prose by Mozambican authors or residents, the INCM Almada Negreiros Prize for São Tomé and Príncipe, and the INCM Arnaldo Santos Prize for Angola. All of them require unpublished work.
Can you enter if you live outside Portugal?
This is where a lot of our readers fit. The INCM Ferreira de Castro Prize, run with Portugal’s foreign ministry, is for prose or poetry by Portuguese nationals and people of Portuguese descent living abroad. It exists precisely to recognise those writing in Portuguese far from Portugal — Newark, Paris, Johannesburg, Toronto — and it is one of the few Portuguese literary competitions where living overseas is not an obstacle but the entry requirement.
Anyone writing in the diaspora and watching for calls like this has company later in the calendar, in the essay competition for young Portuguese-Americans that closes in September.
Is 31 July really the deadline?
It is. Entries opened on 5 May, World Portuguese Language Day, and shut on 31 July. Two days is enough to submit a text that is already finished. It is not enough to write one. If yours is done, the form takes less time than the hesitation.
Image: INCM
