The Buzz: Novel on sibling with Down’s syndrome wins prize

The novel ‘O meu irmão’ (My Brother), by Afonso Reis Cabral, is the winner of this year’s LeYa Prize for Literature, worth €100,000, the publisher of the same name announced on Friday at an event at its headquarters in Alfragide, near Lisbon. The 24-year-old author is a great-great-grandson of Eça de Queiroz, one of the giants of Portuguese literature.
At the event to announce the winner, the president of the jury, poet and deputy Manuel Alegre, said that the book “deals with a delicate subject that could have given rise to a vulgar sentimental vision: the relation between two brothers, one of them with Down’s Syndrome.” The LeYa prize was inaugurated in 2008. This year 361 original works by authors from 14 countries were submitted.