Literary Conversations and the Formentor Prize return to Mallorca

PalmThe Formentor Foundation has announced this Monday the return of the Formentor Literary Conversations and the prize of the same name to the original place where they were born in the mid-20th century, the hotel now called Four Seasons Mallorca Formentor, where they will be held in the first days of November.

Artists, emulators and copyists. Creating and recreating the world's airsThey will be held from November 1 to 4, and the highlight will be "the grand ceremony for the awarding of the Formentor Prize for Literature to the Portuguese writer Gonçalo M. Tavares" on November 1.

This year's edition of the conversations will be dedicated to art history and is titled Artists, emulators and copyists. Creating and recreating the world's airs. The poster for the conversations features a photograph of the painter Joaquín Sorolla, during one of his visits to Mallorca, with his daughters in Cala Sant Vicenç in 1919, very close to where the event will be held. "This gathering of art world experts will allow us to make a very intelligent approach to all the dilemmas of contemporary art," Baltasar said about the participants, whose names will be announced later. He stressed that "everything will be discussed," including probably AI. The president of the foundation emphasized that "one of the keys to inviting so many experts and writers is that each one brings a complementary vision and reflection on all the topics." "It is not a congress, it is not a symposium, it is a conversation in which each of the invited guests brings their own personal, intellectual and academic history," added Baltasar.

Change of ownership

He recalled that the old Formentor literary conversations were resumed in 2008 and the prize was reinstated in 2011, and their itinerancy began in 2021. "When the ownership of the Formentor hotel changed, we thought that, as was done in the first edition in 1963, when the Franco regime banned the conversations and the celebration of the prizes and began an itinerancy in different places in Austria, France, Greece, and Tunisia in 1967; it was at the same time to start this itinerancy and follow the previous script".

This year's winner, Portuguese Gonçalo M. Tavares, succeeds Hélène Cixous (2025), Láslo Krasznahorkai (2024), Pascal Quignard (2023), Liudmila Ulítskaya (2022), and César Aira (2021).

The director of the current Formentor has explained that during the four days of the event, the hotel will be "fully reserved for writers and with its doors open for literary conversations". He recalled that, in the past, about 600 people attended: "We will try to see how we can manage the volume and we hope to attract as many Majorcans as possible", said Gosálvez. With the recovery of this literary event, Mallorca once again "is a meeting point for European thought", assured the Minister of Tourism and Culture, Jaume Bauzá, who considers that the return of the Formentor Conversations "is the restitution of context and the recognition that thought is not made in a vacuum". "Formentor is not just geography, it is also an idea", he concluded.