After receiving the Pessoa Prize and the decoration awarded by the President of the Republic, in a ceremony at Culturgest, in Lisbon, Lídia Jorge addressed Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa to thank him for his presence and his words.
This Tuesday, the President of the Republic decorated Lídia Jorge with the grand cross of the Order of Sant’Iago da Espada, after presenting her with the 2025 Pessoa Prize, and also praised her for affirming the “writer’s place as a citizen”.
In turn, after receiving the Pessoa Prize and the decoration awarded by the President of the Republic, in a ceremony at Culturgest, in Lisbon, Lídia Jorge addressed Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa to thank him for his presence and his words.
“For my part, if I admired him from a distance, the last few years have meant that I can admire him up close. They call him the President of affections, but that’s not enough. You were and continue to be the President who knew how to explain the mechanics of democracy to the people, and also knew how to explain the value of culture to the people”, said the writer, considering that “this is an extraordinary legacy”.
The President of the Republic, who spoke earlier, highlighted Lídia Jorge’s “more direct involvement” “with Portuguese political and social reality”at her invitation, as State counselor and in the last celebrations of the 10th of June.
“What I want to highlight is not that Lídia Jorge has assumed this attentive and interventionist position in these years, but that her attention and intervention were recognized by the President”, he declared.
According to Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, “it is fair to say that his public speech on June 10, in Lagos, and the more restricted interventions in the State Council” in recent years, broadened the “perception of his character and his commitment, going beyond the public that follows Portuguese fiction”.
“Much of what is said today about Lídia Jorge has to do with the extension and diversification of her literary project. But with Lídia Jorge we see, above all, a reiteration and densification – unfortunately without evident continuity in subsequent generations – of the writer’s place as a citizen, as someone who cares and tells us: worry”, he added.
The President of the Republic considered that “his unrest, which is above all with the word, the sentence, the paragraph, the structure, is also part of the writer’s lineage as national consciousness” or “social consciousness” of the present time.
“Restlessness, goodwill, humanism, conscience are inseparable from his books. How inseparable is the idea, which as President I tried not to forget, that the History of Portugal is complex, it is debatable, it has glories and it has traumas and cannot be called up for the benefit of an inventory, but as a whole”, he continued.
O Head of State described Portugal as “a country made up of diverse expatriate, emigrant and immigrant resident communities”with “many stories to tell and to rescue”, including “that of the diversity and equality of all Portuguese and all people, against the revivals of bad memory and divisionism that the Portuguese have known so sensibly and calmly to reject”.
“I thank Lídia Jorge, as a reader, for her books. I thank Lídia Jorge, as President of the Republic, for her service to Portugal and the Portuguese. And, in line with a tradition established here in the awarding of this award, once this award is completed, I will present, in the name of the Portuguese, to Lídia Jorge, the grand cross of the Order of Sant’Iago da Espada, which signifies the maximum recognition of what we owe her in favor of Portuguese culture”, announced.
The Order of Saint Iago da Espada intended to distinguish literary, scientific and artistic merit.
O Pessoa Prize is an initiative of the newspaper Expressosponsored by Caixa Geral de Depósitos, awarded annually to a national personality who has distinguished himself in the cultural, literary, scientific, artistic or legal areas.
At the beginning of his speech, the head of state remembered Francisco Pinto Balsemão, former prime minister and president of the Impresa group, who died in October last year, saying that this award “was his idea and his project”.
