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.
Jabuti 2026 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“A Delicate Collection of Absences”
Aline Bei · 38 when first published
Novel · 288 pages · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:A girl and the palm-reading grandmother who is raising her live wrapped up in each other in a small house, until the grandmother's mother, homeless and bitter, moves in.
Jabuti 2026 · Shortlist
Eliana Alves Cruz · 59 when first published
Novel · 184 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Aurora and Ernesto escape the favela for a middle-class life and raise successful, respectable children; each member of this Black family then tells what the climb cost them.
Jabuti 2026 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Now and Then, Billie Holiday”
Evandro Affonso Ferreira · 80 when first published
Novel · 128 pages
AI-generated summary:Cowering under a table, a young man from the backlands, beaten by his guardian, a local strongman, for resembling his mother, is coaxed by a woman's voice to become the woman he longs to be.
Jabuti 2026 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Fearless Heart”
Itamar Vieira Junior · 46 when first published
Novel · 336 pages · Family, Politics · Trilogia da terra, book 3
AI-generated summary:A supermarket cashier in Salvador, Rita Preta, sets out to find her teenage son after he vanishes from their neighbourhood without a word.
Jabuti 2026 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Dance of Deceptions”
Milton Hatoum · 73 when first published
Novel · 256 pages · Family, Politics · O lugar mais sombrio, book 3
AI-generated summary:Late in the 1960s, with the military regime hardening and her son Martim drifting away, Lina resolves to write her own account of her life and those around her.
Jabuti 2025 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Extraordinary North Zone”
Alberto Mussa · 63 when first published
Novel · 232 pages · Crime, Historical
AI-generated summary:In 1974, on Rio's north side, someone looks into what became of Antenor Baeta, a samba-loving police detective who went missing in 1966.
Jabuti 2025 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Bambino in Rome”
Chico Buarque · 80 when first published
Novel · 168 pages · Coming of age, Autofiction, Family
AI-generated summary:A Brazilian boy newly arrived in 1950s Rome explores the city by bicycle, writes love letters to his first crush and plays football with the greengrocer's son, in a fiction drawn from memory.
Jabuti 2025 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Where They Come From”
Jeferson Tenório · 47 when first published
Novel · 208 pages · Coming of age, Politics
AI-generated summary:Joaquim, a penniless orphan nursing his grandmother in Porto Alegre around 2000, wins a university place under the new racial quotas and clings to his love of books.
Jabuti 2025 · Shortlist
Marcelino Freire · 57 when first published
Novel · 152 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:A father and his son in the backlands live with a silence between them as heavy as the grave, told in an old, sung kind of speech.
Jabuti 2024 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“My Brother, Myself”
João Silvério Trevisan · 79 when first published
Novel · 256 pages · Family, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:Diagnosed with HIV in 1992, a writer expects to die; instead it is his beloved younger brother, his firmest support, who falls ill with cancer.
Jabuti 2024 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Sweet Woods”
Novel · 304 pages · Family, Love
AI-generated summary:The day before her wedding, as she tries on her dress, a young woman in a village of rural Bahia is struck by a tragedy at the hands of a brutal landowner.
Jabuti 2023 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Beatriz and the Poet”
Cristovão Tezza · 70 when first published
Novel · 192 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Stuck at home in the pandemic after years of political dread, the translator Beatriz is drawn into a hesitant, unlikely bond with a young poet, Gabriel.
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 2023 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Less Than One”
Patrícia Melo · 60 when first published
Novel · 368 pages · Politics
AI-generated summary:A crowd of people who live on Brazil's streets, among them a waste picker who dreams of revolution, a pregnant girl of fourteen and a trans woman, fight to get through each day.
Jabuti 2023 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Future Life”
Sérgio Rodrigues · 60 when first published
Novel · 168 pages · Satire, Speculative
AI-generated summary:Outraged to hear their novels are to be simplified for modern readers, the ghosts of José de Alencar and Machado de Assis come down from Olympus to the Rio of 2020.
Jabuti 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Little Choreography of Goodbye”
Aline Bei · 34 when first published
Novel · 264 pages · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Júlia grows up between a mother who never got over being left and a father who regrets ever having married, and tries to find her own shape as a person and a writer.
Jabuti 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Paediatrician”
Andréa del Fuego · 46 when first published
Novel · 160 pages · Satire, Love
AI-generated summary:Cecília became a children's doctor like her father, though she has no love for babies and none for their parents, and now a gentle rival is stealing her patients.
Jabuti 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Extinction of the Bees”
Natalia Borges Polesso · 40 when first published
Novel · 312 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:Left by her mother and orphaned when her father dies, Regina, short of money and options in a crumbling world, begins performing for strangers online behind a gorilla mask.
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 · 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 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Not a Sign of Wings”
Marcela Dantés · 34 when first published
Novel · 229 pages
AI-generated summary:Behind police tape, a solitary woman's body lies unclaimed in her apartment, and the book looks back over the quiet days of her life.
Jabuti 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Two-State Solution”
Michel Laub · 47 when first published
Novel · 248 pages · Family, Politics
AI-generated summary:A troubled German director filming a documentary on violence in Brazil sits down separately with a São Paulo sister and brother, after the sister is assaulted at an arts debate in 2018.
Jabuti 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Faith in Hell”
Santiago Nazarian · 43 when first published
Novel · 376 pages · Historical, War, Politics
AI-generated summary:In 2017 São Paulo, a young gay carer of Indigenous descent takes a job looking after an old Armenian man and comes to suspect his patient survived the 1915 massacres.
Jabuti 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“All Saints”
Adriana Lisboa · 49 when first published
Novel · 152 pages · Family, Love
AI-generated summary:Years after her small brother was electrocuted in a holiday pool, Vanessa, now working as a biologist in New Zealand, tries to make sense of his death and of her love for his best friend.
Jabuti 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“These People”
Chico Buarque · 75 when first published
Novel · 200 pages · Satire, Politics
AI-generated summary:Manuel Duarte had a best-seller in the 1990s; now broke, blocked and lonely, he keeps a jumpy diary as Rio de Janeiro comes apart around his Leblon streets.
Jabuti 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Letter to the Mad Queen”
Maria Valéria Rezende · 77 when first published
Novel · 144 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:In 1789 a woman shut away in a convent retreat in Olinda writes letters to Portugal's queen, Maria I, describing what colonial officials do in her name to women and the enslaved.
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
Title translated by AI:“Chlorine”
Alexandre Vidal Porto · 53 when first published
Novel · 152 pages · Love, Family
AI-generated summary:Speaking from beyond the grave, a São Paulo lawyer who died at fifty revisits the closeted life he built, the family he raised, and the secret affairs that followed a tragedy.
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 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Tyranny of Love”
Cristovão Tezza · 66 when first published
Novel · 176 pages · Satire, Politics
AI-generated summary:Standing at a red light, an economist in his fifties resolves to renounce sex for good, just as his marriage, his job and his country seem to be collapsing.
Jabuti 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“There Was Never a Castle”
Martha Batalha · 45 when first published
Novel · 256 pages · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:Over 110 years, a Swedish consul's family in Rio, whose founder raised a castle in still-empty Ipanema in 1904, is shaped by two New Year's Eve parties seventy years apart.
Jabuti 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Eighth of the Seventh”
Novel · 151 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Two women in love, Magda and Glória, an angel and the city of Rome take turns telling a story that turns on the eighth of July and on the women's affairs with two men.
Jabuti 2018 · Shortlist
Gisele Mirabai · 37 when first published
Novel · 176 pages
AI-generated summary:A girl who grew up among horses and orange groves in Minas Gerais, reading about the ancient world beside her father, now drifts aimlessly through London.
Jabuti 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Father, Father”
João Silvério Trevisan · 73 when first published
Novel · 252 pages · Family, Autofiction, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Beaten as a small boy by a drinking father who despises his effeminacy, a firstborn son in rural São Paulo state takes refuge in a seminary before the age of ten.
Jabuti 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Night Within the Night”
Joca Reiners Terron · 49 when first published
Novel · 464 pages · Coming of age, Politics
AI-generated summary:An eleven-year-old knocks his head in a school game, falls into a coma, and wakes up with his memory fading and a conviction that the adults looking after him are impostors.
Jabuti 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Last Hour”
Novel · 352 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:In early-1950s Rio, a reporter who was tortured under Vargas's dictatorship agrees, after first saying no, to work for Última Hora, the daily founded with Vargas's support.
Jabuti 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Dirty Laundry”
Novel · 184 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:After the mother is gone, a rural household in the far south of Brazil lives with harshness, strict morals and silences between a timid son and a closed-off father.
Jabuti 2018 · Shortlist
Lucrecia Zappi · 45 when first published
Novel · 208 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Nelson, once Marcela's boyfriend and her husband Oscar's teenage rival, comes back from the remote state of Acre and rents a flat in their São Paulo building.
Jabuti 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Translator”
Cristovão Tezza · 64 when first published
Novel · 208 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:In Curitiba before the 2014 World Cup, a translator battling an ornate Catalan author gets a mysterious empty envelope and an offer to interpret for a FIFA official.
Jabuti 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Other Songs”
Maria Valéria Rezende · 74 when first published
Novel · 152 pages · Politics
AI-generated summary:On a long bus ride a teacher recalls the years she spent in a remote village in Paraíba under the dictatorship, and the wanderings that led her there.
Jabuti 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Paraná Bazaar”
Luis S. Krausz · 54 when first published
Novel · 288 pages · Migration, Historical
AI-generated summary:In the 1970s a boy from São Paulo, his brother and their grandmother visit an elderly couple among the German refugees who fled Hitler to a frontier settlement in Paraná.
Jabuti 2016 · Shortlist
Sheyla Smanioto · 25 when first published
Novel · 303 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Maria de Fátima, growing up hungry in two invented backwater towns, carries in her body what poverty did to the generations before her.
Jabuti 2015 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Worst Days of My Life Were All of Them”
Evandro Affonso Ferreira · 69 when first published
Novel · 128 pages
AI-generated summary:From her hospital bed a woman imagines herself wandering unclothed through a great city, observing people's vanity and mourning a writer friend who has died.
Jabuti 2015 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Notebook of an Absent Man”
João Anzanello Carrascoza · 52 when first published
Novel · 126 pages · Family · Trilogia do adeus, book 1
AI-generated summary:An older father, fearing he will not live to see his baby daughter Bia become a woman, writes down for her everything he wants her to know.
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 2014 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Description of the World”
Veronica Stigger · 40 when first published
Novel · 154 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:Just before the Second World War, a Polish man named Opalka travels to the Amazon to find a sick son he had never heard of.
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 2012 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Stranger in the Corridor”
Novella · 128 pages
AI-generated summary:A solitary man who dreams of writing gets by teaching at a small language school, until an ominous stranger starts turning up wherever he goes.
Jabuti 2012 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“On Those Hills, After the Rain”
Edival Lourenço · 59 when first published
Novel · 236 pages · Historical · Trilogia de Goiás, book 1
AI-generated summary:In colonial Brazil a Portuguese governor sets out to turn scattered gold diggings in the central savanna into a province, as recounted by his gelded night watchman.
Jabuti 2011 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Gospel of Barabbas”
José Roberto Torero, Marcus Aurelius Pimenta · José Roberto Torero 47 when first published
Novel · 224 pages · Historical, Satire
AI-generated summary:Barabbas, the bandit released in place of Jesus, gets a life story of his own: a quick-moving, twisting comic adventure stuffed with scriptural echoes.
Jabuti 2011 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Passenger at the End of the Day”
Rubens Figueiredo · 54 when first published
Novel · 200 pages · Politics
AI-generated summary:Riding the bus to see his girlfriend in the Tirol, a run-down, violent district on the city's fringe, Pedro half-listens to the radio, reads, watches, and begins to see his world differently.
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
Title translated by AI:“Mountain Range”
Daniel Galera · 29 when first published
Novel · 176 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:A young Brazilian author, freshly single and grieving a friend who killed herself, travels to Buenos Aires when her first novel comes out in Spanish.
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 · 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 2008 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Sun Sets in São Paulo”
Bernardo Carvalho · 47 when first published
Novel · 168 pages · Historical, War, Love
AI-generated summary:Late one night in Liberdade, São Paulo's Japanese district, a restaurateur singles out a lingering diner, decides he must be a novelist, and entrusts him with a wartime love story.
Jabuti 2007 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Through the Eye of the Needle”
Antônio Torres · 66 when first published
Novel · 220 pages · Migration, Family · Trilogia de Totonhim, book 3
AI-generated summary:Retired, divorced and alone in São Paulo, a man who left his backland town long ago lies awake reviewing his life and yearning for a home that has vanished.
Jabuti 2007 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Partial View of the Night”
Luiz Ruffato · 45 when first published
Novel · 154 pages · Family, Migration · Inferno provisório, book 3
AI-generated summary:Linked fragments return to the Italian immigrant families of Cataguases in Minas Gerais and the alley at the heart of their town, the third volume of a cycle.
Jabuti 2006 · Shortlist
Domingos Pellegrini · 56 when first published
Novel · 287 pages
Jabuti 2006 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“King's Eye”
Edgard Telles Ribeiro · 61 when first published
Novel · 272 pages · Historical, Migration
AI-generated summary:A Frenchman on the run from the Nazis reaches Rio, serves coffee and cakes, smuggles, cuts hair and waits on a senator, and finally runs his own bar.
Jabuti 2006 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Hidden Boy”
Godofredo de Oliveira Neto · 54 when first published
Novel · 224 pages
AI-generated summary:A Portuguese-born teacher at a school on Rio's outskirts leads a second life as a forger, able to copy any canvas exactly.
Jabuti 2005 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Photographer”
Cristovão Tezza · 52 when first published
Novel · 223 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:In Curitiba, days before the 2002 presidential vote, an unnamed photographer is paid in cash to secretly photograph a young woman, and five lives quietly intersect in one day.
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 2004 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Still Bank of the River”
Luiz Antonio de Assis Brasil · 58 when first published
Novel · 176 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:Pedro II once promised a cattleman in the far south a barony, or so the man writes; the court's widowed historian is dispatched to the pampas to find out if it is true.