The Cuban writer and poet Waldo Leyva received the National Literature Award 2024 during a ceremony held at the 33rd International Book Fair of Havana.
Upon receiving the maximum recognition of Cuban literature, the poet dedicated his speech to poetry as his reason for being, highlighting his power to provide existential answers and to allow readers to reflect on the complex roads of life, projection Latin press
“What made me happy to receive this Lauro is to confirm that what has been done for several decades has served for others to find answers, to fall in love, to save the dream or understand the labyrinths of existence,” Leyva said.
The National Literature Award was delivered by the Minister of Culture of Cuba, Alpidio Alonso, and the president of Casa de las Américas, Abel Prieto, who highlighted the unanimity of the jury by granting this award to Leyva.
Waldo Leyva: “In poetry, as Martí remembered, you can’t lie”
Leyva has received in the last prestigious international awards, such as the Casa de América American Award of Poetry (2010) and the Víctor Valera Mora International Prize in Venezuela (2012).
Waldo Leyva was born in Aiosa’s shot, in the former province of Las Villas (today Villa Clara), in 1943. He has developed a wide literary career, in addition to his work as director-founder of the University Theater of the University of Oriente.
Among his works are Of the city and the heroes (1974), From the east of Angola (1976), With a lot of skin people (1983), The dust of the roads (1984) and The Strangle of Stone (1995).
In an interview for Oncuba last November, He said that he reached poetry, even without being aware of it, Through the popular tradition, because his childhood and his adolescence passed in a peasant atmosphere.
“In my family, the tenth and versification were part of everyday life. My grandfather and my uncles were good improvisers of verses, and I learned to make quartets and couplets from very early, even before knowing how to read and write, something that I was lucky to achieve in a brief stay of a few months in the town of Florida , Camagüey, ”the poet told the journalist Alex Fleites.
For Waldo, poetry “exceeds the limit of genres and that of artistic languages” and “can be found, provided that adequate sensitivity is possessed, the same in the poem, than in the stories, in an oil, in The impalpable cadence of music, in the unrepeatable gesture of the dancer or in a stain left by moisture on the ruins of a wall. ”
