All prizes Brazil
Brazil · Since 1959 · For books in Portuguese
Brazil's oldest book prize, awarded each year in São Paulo by the Câmara Brasileira do Livro; its novel category (Romance Literário since 2020) honours a novel in Portuguese published in Brazil the year before. Until 2017 the jury ranked three books and only the first is listed as winner here, except 2000–2003, when the archive ranks none and all three are winners.
The idea for the prize took shape at the Câmara Brasileira do Livro in the late 1950s, and the jabuti, a tortoise, was chosen as its symbol. At the first ceremony, in 1959, Jorge Amado won the novel prize for Gabriela, Cravo e Canela. In 2010 Chico Buarque's Leite Derramado was named Book of the Year although it had placed second in the novel category; a petition asked him to return the trophy. The publisher Record left the prize that year, criticising its voting system. In 2018 the prize was reorganised: 29 categories became 18 in four areas, each with a single winner, and the novel prize was split into literary and entertainment novels. In 2019 a two-stage shortlist was introduced: ten semifinalists, then five finalists. The Book of the Year is chosen from the category winners; its purse fell from 100,000 to 70,000 reais in 2023.
Showing 27 of 101 books. 74 aren’t in English yet: show all.
Jabuti 2024 · Winner
Salvar o Fogo
Itamar Vieira Junior · 44 when first published
Novel · 304 pages · Family, Politics · Trilogia da terra, book 2
AI-generated summary:Raised by his stern older sister Luzia, whom neighbours suspect of sorcery, a motherless boy grows up by a river in Bahia on land owned by an old monastery.
Jabuti 2023 · Shortlist
Via Ápia
Geovani Martins · 31 when first published
Novel · 352 pages · Coming of age, Politics
AI-generated summary:When police move into Rocinha, Rio's largest favela, to install a permanent 'pacification' unit, five young men living there feel the ground shift under them.
Jabuti 2022 · Winner
O Som do Rugido da Onça
Micheliny Verunschk · 49 when first published
Novel · 192 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:Two Indigenous children taken from Brazil to Munich by the German naturalists Spix and Martius in 1820 are given back their voices; in our time, a young woman sees one of them in an exhibition.
Jabuti 2022 · Shortlist
Vista Chinesa
Tatiana Salem Levy · 42 when first published
Novel · 144 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:In 2014, with Rio euphoric about the coming World Cup and Olympics, an architect out jogging in the forest above the city is seized at gunpoint and raped.
Jabuti 2021 · Winner
O Avesso da Pele
Jeferson Tenório · 43 when first published
Novel · 150 pages · Family, Politics
AI-generated summary:Once his father has died, Pedro goes back over the older man's footsteps and his family's history, and over what it meant to be Black in a Brazil scarred by racism and failing schools.
Jabuti 2021 · Shortlist
Os Supridores
José Falero · 33 when first published
Novel · 304 pages · Crime, Satire
AI-generated summary:Fed up with being exploited, two supermarket shelf-stackers from a Porto Alegre favela go into business selling marijuana when local dealers stop stocking it.
Jabuti 2020 · Winner
Torto Arado
Itamar Vieira Junior · 40 when first published
Novel · 288 pages · Family, Politics · Trilogia da terra, book 1
AI-generated summary:Two little sisters in the backlands of Bahia open their grandmother's case and find a strange old blade; what happens next ties their lives together for good.
Also: International Booker 2024 shortlist
Jabuti 2020 · Shortlist
Marrom e Amarelo
Paulo Scott · 53 when first published
Novel · 232 pages · Family, Politics
AI-generated summary:Federico, pale-skinned, and his younger brother Lourenço, who is Black, grow up in Porto Alegre as sons of a Black forensic chief; at 49, Federico is summoned to a quotas commission.
Jabuti 2019 · Shortlist
Enterre Seus Mortos
Ana Paula Maia · 41 when first published
Novel · 136 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:Edgar Wilson scrapes roadkill off the highways for a living; when he finds a woman hanging in the forest and no police van can come, he takes her body to the depot freezer.
Jabuti 2016 · Winner
A Resistência
Julián Fuks · 34 when first published
Novel · 154 pages · Family, Autofiction, Politics
AI-generated summary:The youngest child of Argentine analysts who fled the junta for Brazil sets out to write about the brother they adopted before he was born, and about the silence around it.
Jabuti 2014 · Shortlist
A Maçã Envenenada
Michel Laub · 40 when first published
Novel · 160 pages · Coming of age, Love
AI-generated summary:In 1993 a teenage conscript in Porto Alegre, who plays guitar in a band, weighs going absent without leave, and risking jail, to catch Nirvana's one Brazilian show with his girlfriend.
Jabuti 2013 · Shortlist
Barba Ensopada de Sangue
Daniel Galera · 33 when first published
Novel · 416 pages · Family, Nature
AI-generated summary:Grieving his father, an unnamed swimming coach who cannot recognise faces retreats to a small beach town in southern Brazil with his father's old dog, Beta.
Jabuti 2013 · Shortlist
Glória
Victor Heringer · 24 when first published
Novel · 312 pages · Family, Satire
AI-generated summary:Three Rio brothers inherit their clan's private jokes, its hypochondria, and its curse: in this family nobody dies of illness or accident, only of grief.
Jabuti 2010 · Winner
Se Eu Fechar os Olhos Agora
Edney Silvestre · 59 when first published
Novel · 318 pages · Crime, Coming of age, Politics
AI-generated summary:In 1961, two boys cutting school in a sleepy town in Rio de Janeiro state stumble on a young woman's mutilated body, and doubt the official story that her husband did it.
Jabuti 2010 · Shortlist
Leite Derramado
Chico Buarque · 65 when first published
Novel · 177 pages · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:A man past a hundred lies in a Rio hospital, rambling to anyone nearby about the illustrious ancestors of his fading family and about Matilde, the wife he lost.
Jabuti 2010 · Shortlist
Os Espiões
Luis Fernando Verissimo · 73 when first published
Novel · 168 pages · Crime, Satire
AI-generated summary:A grumpy reader at a small press opens an envelope addressed in a shaky hand and finds a woman's confession that ends, she says, with her suicide.
Jabuti 2009 · Shortlist
Órfãos do Eldorado
Milton Hatoum · 56 when first published
Novella · 164 pages · Love, Historical, Family
AI-generated summary:Sheltering from the sun by the Amazon, a traveller hears an old man the town calls mad recount his doomed passion for a strange orphan girl and his family's rubber fortune.
Jabuti 2008 · Winner
O Filho Eterno
Cristovão Tezza · 55 when first published
Novel · 224 pages · Family, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:A struggling writer in his thirties becomes a father in the early 1980s, and the son he longed for is born with Down syndrome.
Jabuti 2008 · Shortlist
Antonio
Beatriz Bracher · 46 when first published
Novel · 212 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Expecting his first child, Benjamim learns something hidden about his family and seeks out three elderly witnesses to explain it.
Jabuti 2006 · Winner
Cinzas do Norte
Milton Hatoum · 53 when first published
Novel · 278 pages · Coming of age, Politics, Family
AI-generated summary:Lavo, an orphan of modest means in 1950s Manaus, befriends Mundo, the wilful heir of a jute magnate, and follows his rebellion over a lifetime.
Jabuti 2005 · Winner
Vozes do Deserto
Nélida Piñon · 67 when first published
Novel · 254 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:Baghdad's ruler takes a new bride each evening and kills her at sunrise, until his minister's clever daughter volunteers to marry him, armed only with tales.
Jabuti 2005 · Shortlist
Lorde
João Gilberto Noll · 58 when first published
Novel · 120 pages · Migration
AI-generated summary:Invited to London by a man he has never met, a Brazilian novelist of fifty lands in winter, is lodged in an East End flat, and cannot work out what is wanted of him.
Jabuti 2004 · Shortlist
Budapeste
Chico Buarque · 59 when first published
Novel · 192 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:José Costa writes other people's books in Rio for a living; worn out by his own gift, he drifts towards writing literature and towards Hungary and its famously difficult tongue.
Jabuti 2003 · Winner
Nove Noites
Bernardo Carvalho · 42 when first published
Novel · 288 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:A Brazilian writer reads by chance about Buell Quain, a gifted American ethnographer who took his own life in the backlands in 1939, and cannot stop digging into why.
Jabuti 2001 · Winner
Dois Irmãos
Milton Hatoum · 48 when first published
Novel · 240 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:The twins Yaqub and Omar grow into bitter rivals in their Lebanese family's house in Manaus, watched by the servant's boy, who wonders which man there is his father.
Jabuti 2000 · Winner
A Mulher que Escreveu a Bíblia
Moacyr Scliar · 62 when first published
Novel · 168 pages · Historical, Satire
AI-generated summary:Regression therapy persuades a modern Brazilian saleswoman that, in an earlier life three millennia back, she was the true author of the Bible's first draft.