The Nicaraguan poet William González, in Madrid Alfredo Urdaci
Young Nicaraguan poet William González (Managua, 23 years old) won the Hiperion Poetry Prize this Tuesday for his work Inmigrantes de Segunda, which deals with the lives of migrant women and their tireless efforts to raise their families in Spain. The prize jury has highlighted that González “persists and extends his theme to the world of the dispossessed, and in particular to the dispossessed immigrant women with whom we live without paying much attention to them and whose lives find no echo in the world of poetry”. . It is an intimate and autobiographical portrait in which González pays homage to his mother, a migrant from Nicaragua who came to Spain in the early 2000s to work as a domestic worker. “It’s a tribute to them and to the Latin American migrant women who are exploited at work,” González said in a phone interview. This is the first time a Central American poet has won the Hiperion Poetry Prize, which has been awarded to unpublished works by creators under the age of 35 since 1986.
The jury, made up of poets and writers Ariadna G. García, Benjamín Prado, Jesús Munárriz, Francisco Castaño and Ben Clark, highlighted that González’s poetry is “necessary poetry because it stems from the need to have a voice give to make visible those who are remain in the blind spot of our satisfied gaze that never wonders, like the hospital where they treat me, the office where I work, the house where I live, are clean. Nor what is beyond the bright shopping streets, the wide avenues, the squares with pigeons. Who lives and how on the edge of history”.
The decision of the jury for the award of the XXXVIII. Hipperión Poetry Prize.
The young poet received the news of the award “with great satisfaction” because it was a “great recognition for Nicaragua, Central and Latin America”. González defines his poetry as social because it addresses the problems of migrants. As the son of migrants, González is interested in the difficult conditions in which they work in Spain. “The main axis is my mother, a domestic worker who came to clean houses in the early 2000s. The book deals with domestic workers, poverty, neighborhood exclusion and death because my mother had a very physical job that aged her bones, although she is in her fifties, her bones are those of an 80″ woman, the explains Poet. “It’s a very low-paying physical job,” he adds. In the book, González says, she breaks literary conventions by beginning with three quotes from Latin American women denouncing workplace abuse.
Marginality is a theme the young poet has already grappled with in his debut film Los nadies, delving into a lament about the problems faced by migrants, caterers, street vendors and impoverished youth who have to resist every day in a European country who turns their backs on them. The book, which won the Antonio Carvajal Young Poetry Award, has as its “main success in eschewing both the prosaic document and the pitiful tear, in order to make a lyrical testimony full of the future,” according to a review published by Luis Bagué Quílez in Babelia.
William González with a copy of his book The Nobody Alfredo Urdaci
González explains that the migration was “very hard”. A painful uprooting, although he arrived in Spain as a child: he had to leave his friends and school and start from scratch in a foreign country. Also in loneliness, because her mother left the house at 7 a.m. every day and didn’t come back until late at night, also worked on Saturdays and Sundays “to make ends meet”. He took refuge in poetry, he says, with Rubén Darío and Ernesto Cardenal as the main characters. “Poetry is my life, not an outlet, it’s my everyday life,” he says. “Poetry has always been the maximum display of the beauty of language,” he adds.
News of the award has provoked reactions from the two most prominent Nicaraguan writers, Gioconda Belli and Sergio Ramírez. “News today on Poetry Day: William González from Nicaragua has won the prestigious Hiperión Poetry Prize. Congratulations to William on his second major prize in Spain where he turned 10,” Belli wrote on Twitter. “El Hiperion, one of Spain’s most important poetry prizes, goes to the Nicaraguan William González. What joy and what pride “, Ramírez has said for his part.
González says he will continue to write denunciational poetry that pays attention to the unprotected. “I’m doing it out of common sense. I speak it from my background because I see my mother suffer. You have to live it to tell it. I will not distance myself from reality because my poetry will always be linked to what I have experienced,” affirms the young poet.
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