The prominent writer from Las Tunas Carlos Esquivel won the 2022 Nicolás Guillén Poetry Prize with his text La Guagua de Babel (Babel's Bus), as it was announced today at the Dulce María Loynaz Center in Havana.
Las Tunas, Cuba.- The jury, made up of Jesús David Curbelo, Alex Pausides, and Leymen Pérez, distinguished in the work its "notable compositional dramaturgy, in which the lyrical subject dialogues with personalities from history and the cultural field, such as Trotsky, Stalin, Breton, Reinaldo Arenas, Wittgenstein, Diderot, among others, through a philosophical and questioning perspective of our reality.”
According to their opinion, "this curious volume is a poetic novel and an ontological journey, which travels through various settings and eras to reveal the greatness and misery of humanity, based on a high concentration and expressive force."
Thus, Esquivel Guerra receives his most important award on Cuban soil, to congratulate a profuse literary career, with some 40 published books and texts published in more than 20 countries.
Although he considers it the ultimate evidence of his potential as an author, and not the award itself, he can't help but told 26: "I'm happy." And he stops to explain the game of cultural masks, already characteristic of his work, which this time he used to create a kind of breeding ground in which the most infinite reflections could fit, those that put together La Guagua de Babel.
"I am removing, embodying moments, figures from universal history, from Culture, especially from literature, using them from a playful point of view; but, also sometimes, from a very corrosive label, a contextual mark that is not very kind to those authors, to those I revere, to whom I am inevitably linked by extreme, supreme complicity. And I dialogue with them and, at the same time, the dialogue is an exalted contemplation of how much poetry can create, superimpose, and distinguish a very referential worldview, within the universe of experiences that are gravitating around the social and cultural life of a poet."
A mention was granted in the contest to Taladro (Drill), by Víctor Fowler; and a first mention to the collection of poems by Alberto Marrero, El Verbo y la Cifra (The Verb and the Number).