The Holguin poet, narrator and essayist Ronel González Sánchez agreed to talk with Granma about his time at the Havana Book Fair, where he received his 2025 Nicolás Guillén Prize, for the work Central Patria, which according to the jury has content that achieves universality and a narrative component with a conversational tone.
Radio Angulo digital reproduces the interview with this outstanding writer with a prolific literary work and numerous awards and distinctions in Cuba and abroad.
What was the first inkling that warned you that poetry would have a predominant place in your life?
«I started writing poetry when I was nine years old, and as a teenager I became aware that, above all, I would be a poet. My first creations were rhymed texts. Little by little other expressive possibilities arrived. I especially remember a tenth, written at 13; It was titled Nature, and it awakened the torrent of sounds.
“The night is the favorable friend of verses,” said Martí. Does it work like that for you?
«Although in 2020 I published Nothing is real except the night, a collection of poems about the independence deeds, in reality I usually write more frequently in the early hours of the morning. Before I used to get up early to dedicate myself to creating, today I get up early for less lyrical tasks. Afternoons and evenings are generally for reading or reviewing texts.
He is also a narrator. But more of a poet? More of a narrator?
«I am a poet who tries to write fiction and who still cannot get rid of stigmas from my time in literary workshops. I have almost managed to overcome those traumas, but, from time to time, they appear and mortify me.
Now win the Nicolás Guillén Prize. What will the reader find in the work?
«This book is my vision of the cultural complex of Cuban sugar production, which is at the roots of the formation of our identity. The joy and pain of the birth of sugar. The wounded hands of the macheteros in the cut. The metamorphosis of the mill and the beings who at its side erected a hymn, an ode and a requiem. The glorious intensity of a process and its almost definitive disassembly. The entities that, from the shadows, shaped the nation. The heartbreaking whistle of the derailed locomotive and the right hand of a child choosing fragments of metal for an imitation of a fleeing toy. This is a book to present in the old bateyes and in the manufacturing museums. “Also, to put our hand on the shoulders of the heroes and revere their journey.”
What does it mean to have won an award that reveres Nicolás Guillén?
«Our Guillén is one of the most significant poets of the Spanish language. Since my childhood I know his poems by heart. The cane fields to which he sang with indelible impetus integrated the ferment of my poems. Central Patria is also a tribute to Nicolás. I hope I don’t disappoint him or the readers.
With information from Madeleine Sautié/Granma / Translated by Radio Angulo
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