Gioconda Belli awarded Carlos Fuentes Prize, continues Voice of Resistance
Nicaraguan writer Gioconda Belli has been honored with the Carlos Fuentes prize, recognizing her important contribution to universal literature. The jury,comprised of historian rodrigo Martínez Baracs,writers Ana Clavel and Natalia Toledo,author Claudia Piñeiro,and poet luis García montero,lauded the “link of intimate reflection and shared memory” present in her work.
Belli’s early poetry debuted in The Literary Press, a cultural weekly affiliated with the Nicaraguan newspaper La Prensa, a media outlet targeted and ultimately confiscated by the current regime of Daniel Ortega. In 2023, Ortega revoked Belli’s Nicaraguan nationality, alongside those of approximately one hundred other writers, intellectuals, journalists, and dissenting voices, including fellow exiled writer and Cervantes Prize laureate, Sergio Ramírez.
A former member of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), the guerrilla group that ousted the Somoza dictatorship in 1979, Belli experienced a first exile in Mexico and Costa Rica between 1975 and 1979 due to her opposition to the regime. She won the Casa de las Américas Prize in 1978 for her poetry collection Line of Fire. Following the revolution,she held various positions within the Sandinista government and published three further poetry collections in the late 1980s: Thunder and Rainbows,Insurgent Love,and from Eva’s Rib. Her work is noted for its exploration of eroticism, sensuality, and the female body.
“You don’t know when you write what it will mean to express at a certain moment what is new,” Belli explained in a recent interview. “My novelty, I think, was to speak as a woman from the female body and celebrate my sex and my way of seeing the world, no longer as an object, but as the subject of a particular emotional and sensory drive and different from the male gaze that had marked being female.” She further stated that “Being a woman and celebrating every letter of being one was an act of rebellion.”
Established in 2012 in memory of Carlos fuentes, the Carlos Fuentes Prize recognizes authors who enrich global literature through their poetry, novels, essays, and stories. Previous recipients include Elena Poniatowska, Luis García Montero, Mario vargas Llosa, and Sergio ramírez.
Belli is considered one of the most widely read Latin American authors in both America and Europe. Her futuristic novel Waslala has sold one million copies in Germany and 400,000 in Spain, with numerous editions published throughout Latin America. Her most recent publication is A Silence Full of Murmurs.
Despite her exile, Belli remains actively engaged in both her literary work and her political advocacy, consistently speaking out against Ortega’s “dictatorship” in nicaragua. In a recent opinion piece published titled Nicaragua Amputated, she reflected on the cruelty of her current exile and the uncertainty of ever returning to her home, which she describes as being slowly reclaimed by nature. She characterizes this period as “the exile of resistance, of committing to life every day and turning adaptation to a new reality into daily triumph.”
