The Cuban poet Nancy Morejón Hernández has been recognised with the Samuel Feijóo Prize for Poetry on the Environment 2024, awarded annually by the Economic Society of Friends of the Country and its Culture Section, to encourage life’s work that has reflected such themes in its verses.
Fernando Rodríguez Sosa, president of the aforementioned cultural group, told the Cuban News Agency that the award was a unanimous decision by the jury, made up of writer Carmen Serrano Coello, researcher Marta Lesmes and storyteller Dazra Novak, «because they consider nature to be a singular presence in his work».
In addition, due to its «close relationship with her essential poetic postulates and her political commitment to the rights of women, blacks and workers, her poetry of an intimate or social nature reflects nature in its most varied forms as a reflection of life in any part of our inhabited world and at the same time as an expression of the deepest Cuban identity».
Rodríguez Sosa also announced that her section’s award will be presented in person on 9 January at the Ordinary General Meeting of the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País.
Morejón Hernández is the author of an extensive oeuvre, her bibliography includes more than fifty books of poetry, among them Mutismos, Richard trajo su flauta y otros argumentos, and La Quinta de los Molinos, a dozen books of essays, such as Nación y mestizaje en Nicolás Guillén, Fundación de la imagen and Poética de los altares y otros ensayos, and numerous translations of French-speaking writers.
Her texts, translated since the 1980s into more than 14 languages, appear in anthologies and periodicals at home and abroad.
She has won a number of prizes, including the National Literature Prize, the Yari Yari Contemporary Poetry Prize of New York University, the Golden Crown of Struga, Macedonia, the Rafael Alberti Prize, the Maestra de Juventudes Prize of the Hermanos Saíz Association, and the Literary Critics’ Prize, the latter on several occasions.
Born in Havana in 1944, with a degree in French Language and Literature from the University of Havana, she has served as director of the Centre for Caribbean Studies, the Casa de las Américas, president of the Writers’ Association of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba, director of the Cuban Academy of Language and currently directs the magazine Unión.
Samuel Feijóo Rodríguez (1914-1992), Cuban writer and artist, is known for his poetry, narrative and his work as a draughtsman and painter.
(Author: Lino Luben Pérez)
