Gonçalo M. Tavares receives 2026 Premio Formentor, warns AI breeds intellectual quadriplegics

Ceremony on the Mallorcan cape

Portuguese writer Gonçalo M. Tavares, born in Luanda in 1970, received the Premio Formentor de las Letras 2026 on Sunday, 1 November, at Cape Formentor in Mallorca. The award ceremony was set for 20.00 at the Four Seasons Resort Mallorca at Formentor, and earlier that day he had spoken at a press conference on the cape. Basilio Baltasar, director of the Fundación Formentor, previewed the topics the encounter would take up. Tavares described the list of winners as extraordinary because each of them had built a path alone, without looking at who stood beside them.

“I am a writer, not a salesman.”

Warnings about artificial intelligence and attention

Tavares warned that artificial intelligence could produce intellectual quadriplegics out of pure comfort, comparing it with the effort of getting up to change the television channel. He argued that handing writing or analysis to algorithms amounts to giving up reflection. He said mobile phones had begun to dull people's minds and had accelerated the loss of concentration, and he said he has no social media accounts because they would distract him at best and absorb him at worst. Comparing the mind to a sport or art that needs daily training, he recalled solving complex mathematics as a child and said he would no longer know where to begin with those problems.

“The AI can make intellectual quadriplegics out of pure comfort.”

Language as a democratic question

Tavares argued that command of language is a democratic issue, and that a poor grasp of it, like poverty, pushes a citizen out of democracy. He said that in democracies language has the force of karate, so people should learn linguistic self-defence rather than only physical self-defence. Democracy, he said, is a terrain of argument, counterargument, irony and implication, and a citizen who cannot follow these reacts to questions with a bare yes or no. He framed literature as the only place where the full force of language is present, and said that is why language protects people from fascism.

“Whoever does not master language is a disabled citizen.”

The novel and the interview

Tavares's latest novel, O Fim dos Estados Unidos da América, is a satire of decline set during a civil war in the United States, running to roughly 900 pages. It opens with a plague that stays inside the country's borders, and characters first blame rats and mosquitoes before the illness is traced to the poor. The poor are isolated in ghettos, and over time a genetic change leaves rich and poor unable to have children together, forming two human species before a civil war breaks out. The novel was written before the pandemic, and a Spanish edition from Seix Barral is due in 2027. In an interview with La Vanguardia shortly before the ceremony, Tavares described his method as instinctive, sometimes writing twenty pages in one morning and revising them years later, and declined to reveal the book he is currently writing. RTVE's El ojo crítico programme also profiled him in Mallorca, covering his defence of translation as a profession now under pressure from artificial intelligence.