image copyrightGetty Images
The Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramírez entered the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) this Sunday, where he will occupy chair L, vacant since the death of Mario Vargas Llosa.
The RAE has 46 seats, and being elected to one of them means having had a significant influence on the Hispanic language and culture.
"Uphill, downhill, ups and downs, twists and turns, exile, one homeland lost, another gained, is the reflection I make about my life upon entering this house of language," said the writer upon receiving the recognition.
"Welcome, protected, comforted, under the certainty that, if I have not lost something among so many vicissitudes, it is that language," added the author of "Goodbye Boys" (1999).
Born in Masatepe, Nicaragua, Ramírez is the author of dozens of publications including novels, short stories, chronicles and essays; He was winner of the 2017 Cervantes Prize and is recognized for his critical look at the political reality of his country.
Ramírez participated in the Sandinista Revolution of 1979, which overthrew the Anastasio Somoza regime. Later he was vice president of Nicaragua (1985-1990) and is one of the main critics of the government of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, current co-presidents of the Central American country.
Exiled in Madrid since 2021, after being stripped of his citizenship by the Ortega administration, in 2018 he obtained Spanish citizenship.
"After traveling through many places, and after many twists and turns, when the doors of Nicaragua were closed to me, and they also stripped me of my citizenship, I decided that Spain was my place of asylum and seat, and I decided well," he said.
End of Most read
"I have never been a foreigner in Spain," added the writer, who this Sunday assured that Nicaragua lives under a "bizarre and cruel tyranny like few others in the history of Latin America."
For his part, the writer Luis Mateo Díez, also a member of the RAE and in charge of welcoming the Nicaraguan, defined him as "the ideal representative that the Academy requires, within a current Latin American literary panorama of enormous creativity and richness."
In memory of Vargas Llosa
An important part of his speech, titled "An ecumenical novelist", was dedicated to his predecessor in the L chair, Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the Cervantes Prize in 1994 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010.
Although it is common for candidates to pay tribute to whom they succeed, Ramírez went beyond a protocol mention and dedicated a good part of his speech to the prominent Peruvian writer.
"Vargas Llosa is an ecumenical novelist in every sense," he defined.
"The great narrator who crossed the border of the century with his work to always be current, experimental, challenging the canons, inventor of new forms and innovator of language, always committed to the great vital adventure of the imagination, which is a form of freedom," he added.
Ramírez has framed his emergence into literature in the so-called "Latin American boom", along with Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes and Juan Carlos Onetti.
"Before the arrival of the boom narrators, the Latin American novel was still trapped between realism, which had become more traditional, and naturalism that was heading towards the exalted denunciation of injustice and exploitation, with good political will, but with meager literary results," he said.
"That the novel exposes and denounces oppression and injustice is something that Vargas Llosa does not reject," he added.
Ramírez had been elected in May to occupy the L chair. This weekend's ceremony took place at the RAE headquarters in Madrid, Spain.
Discover more
Video
End of Video
