[EN] David Conde Vitalla, winner of the 2026 Santa Isabel de Portugal Poetry Prize

The Diputación de Zaragoza has awarded the XXXVI Prize of Poesía Santa Isabel de Portugal to David Conde Vitalla for his collection of poems «Museo provisional de apariciones y desvelos«. The award is endowed with 5,000 euros and the publication of the work in the collection ‘Veruela Poesía’, which will be presented as soon as possible. A total of 52 works were submitted to this year’s edition.

The jury highlighted the choice of the poetry book in terms of the unitary value in terms of the conception and theme of the set in which each poem is born from a specific artistic work and which functions as a contemporary ecphrasis. In reality, more than a catalogue of paintings, it is a spiritual journey whose artistic vision projects the interiority of its author.

The jury was made up of Ángel Gracia García, winner of the Santa Isabel de Aragón Poetry Prize, Queen of Portugal in 2003 and 2019; Jesús Jiménez Domínguez, poet and literary critic; and Antonio Pérez Lasheras, editor of poetry works, critic and writer.

Among others, this call has been won by Octavio Gómez Milián, Miguel Serrano Larraz, Ángel Gracia García, Sebas Puente Letamendi, Juan Antonio Tello, Miguel Ángel Ortiz Albero, Adolfo Burriel or Dolan Mor.

THE WINNING POETRY BOOK

«Provisional Museum of Apparitions and Sleepless Nights» is conceived as the place arranged to shelter a poetics of the transitory, a space made word that knows of its temporality. The poetic subject discovers himself before himself in a series of artistic works that at a given moment captured his attention. Thus, the work is the result of discovery in contemplation and the need to provide a language that approaches that encounter between the gaze and the observed.

The journey evoked in the collection of poems seeks a silence from which to express the imperceptible, the fleeting, the everyday and his writing is fixed in the memory of «those who resist and the noise of farewells».

ABOUT DAVID CONDE VITALIA

David Conde Vitalia (Zaragoza, 1997) has completed the Bachelor’s Degree in Hispanic Philology and the Master’s Degree in Teaching at the University of Zaragoza. He has published poems in literary magazines such as Ágora, Invernadero, Imán, Turia and Zéjel. Included in the collective books Con clave de F aun Mayor (2015), Amantes, 88 poetas aragoneses (2017), Aki no koe, Voz del otoño (2022), VI Concurso Epitafios: Resiliencia (2023) and Horizontes (2024). Finalist in the Algeciras Fantastika micro-fiction contest (2021); finalist in the short story category in the III multidisciplinary artistic contest on death Punto final (2023).

He has published the poetry collections Sube a nacer conmigo (Los libros del gato negro, 2019), El lenguaje de los ojos (Los libros del gato negro, 2022), Esta hiriente luz (2025) in Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza.