The Nicaraguan poet Gioconda Belli (Managua, 1948) has won the XXXII Reina Sofia Prize for Ibero-American Poetry, the jury announced on Monday at a press conference at the Royal Palace in Madrid.

The prize has a financial donation of 42,100 euros, which is added to the publication of the winner’s anthological collection of poems, as well as to the academic act on the winning poet.

The Madrid-based poet and writer lost her Nicaraguan citizenship in mid-February this year by order of Daniel Ortega’s government, which revoked it from 94 opponents, including fellow writer and Cervantes Prize winner Sergio Ramirez.

Along with compatriots such as Vidalus Meneses, Daisy Zamora or Rosario Murillo, the current Vice President of Nicaragua and the right hand of Daniel Ortega, Belli was part of a younger generation of Nicaraguan poets and writers who combined literature and militancy in the 60s and 70s. against the dictator Somoza. And that over the years they were pursued by Ortega, a former Sandinista wrestling partner.

On March 22, Belli, Ramirez, and other writers stripped of citizenship by Ortega were honored at the Casa de America. An act that was somehow a prelude to this Reina Sofía, the most important poetry prize in the Spanish language, and which implies explicit support for Belli’s commitment to freedom in her country. A few weeks earlier, the writer had torn up her passport live on Televisión Española in protest against the arbitrary measures of the Ortega government.

I am not this document. I am Gioconda Belli, I am a Nicaraguan poetess. And when history forgets these tyrants, I will still be a Nicaraguan poet in my books, ”he said then.