Portuguese novelist António Lobo Antunes is this year’s recipient of the distinguished Premio FIL de Literatura en Lenguas Romances. This year’s prize, worth $150,000, will presented to the author during the annual Feria Internacional del Libro de Guadalajara (Guadalajara International Book Fair, or FIL), which takes place from Nov 29–Dec 7 and sponsors the prize.

Lobo Antunes is one of Portugal’s most translated authors and a past candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. A psychiatrist by training, he served as a military doctor during Angola’s war for independence from Portugal (1961–74). The experience deeply affected the author and consequently his literary works; his many novels share recurring themes, including pain as a result of war, death, human cruelty, and the dictatorship Portugal endured.

The jury credited Lobo Antunes’s oeuvre for its contribution to the “deep reflection on the internal experience of human beings.” In a teleconference from Portugal, the author addressed the jury and press by expressing his appreciation for the city of Guadalajara and, in reference to his works, said, “Wars are the most terrible. In war, no one wins.”

The prize until last year was called Premio de Literatura Latinoamericana y del Caribe Juan Rulfo and awarded only to Latin American authors writing in Spanish. Last year the name was changed to Premio FIL de Literatura; this year “en Lenguas Romances” (in Romance Languages) was in order to also consider authors who write in Catalan, French, Galician, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish. Additionally, the award payment increased 50 percent this year.