The Mozambican David Bene won this Friday the 2021 National Press/Vasco Graça Moura Award, with the poetry work "The emptiness of a sky without hymns.

According to the promoter of the award, the jury believes that the winning work "seeks a language loaded with meaning, sometimes impersonal, sometimes sarcastic, between the fading memory of the sublime and the concrete violence of circumstance and history.

"The Emptiness of a Sky Without Hymns," which takes Wallace Stevens' verse for its title, "starts from the diagnosis" of the American poet's work, to establish "a sequence of intertextual, meditative, surprising poems," as the jury pointed out.

The work of the Mozambican writer was selected from among 90 works in the competition.

Born in Mozambique in 1993 and currently residing in Japan David Bene writes poetry and prose and has published regularly in literary magazines in these two countries, but also in Brazil, Portugal and Spain.

The writer debuted in the literary world with the work "Cancer", which will soon be published, says the Imprensa Nacional.

The Imprensa Nacional/Vasco Graça Moura award was created in 2015, recognizing, alternately, unpublished works in Poetry, Essays and Translation. This year, in its seventh edition, the award was dedicated to poetry.

David Bene has a degree in Geology from Eduardo Mondlane University (Mozambique), a Master in Economic Geology from Akita University (Japan), and is a PhD candidate in Mineral Resources Engineering at Kyushu University (Japan).

The Imprensa Nacional/Vasco Graça Moura Prize has a monetary value of 5,000 euros and includes the publication of the winning work, in 2022, in the public publishing house.