The writer, poet and journalist Waldo Leyva Portal has been awarded the National Literature Prize 2024, the Cuban Book Institute announced on 11 December.

A press release from this entity states that the jury of the prize, made up of Abel Prieto Jiménez, María Elena Llana Castro, Nelson Simón González, Arístides Vega Chapú and Leymen Pérez García, conferred the award on an intellectual with a long and solid career in Cuban literature, as well as being a permanent cultural promoter.

Leyva Portal was born on 16 May 1943 in Remedios and graduated in acting and theatre direction.

He has written numerous books of poetry, essays and plays, and was the founding director of the university theatre at the Universidad de Oriente.

He has worked as a professor of Aesthetics and Cuban and Latin American Literature, and in journalism as founder and director of cultural magazines, as well as teaching poetry creation workshops in Cuba and other countries.

He won the poetry prize in the 1974 Uvero Competition with his book De la ciudad y sus héroes (Of the city and its heroes).

In Granada on 15 May 2010, the jury of the 10th Casa de América Prize for American Poetry declared him the winner of this prize, with his work El rumbo de los días. In addition to this work, another ten books are in his catalogue of creators, the last of which, the anthology «Cuando el cristal no reproduce el rostro», won him the 2012 Víctor Valera Mora International Poetry Prize in Venezuela.

He received the Alejo Carpentier Medal in 2000, among other awards.

Referring to Leyva Portal on the occasion of his 80th birthday in 2023, the writer and president of Cuba’s Casa de las Américas, Abel Prieto, said that he was a great poet, an amazing artist and a brother of the soul.

(With information from ACN)