Ángel Augier

Poet, literary researcher, critic, essayist and journalist. Doctor in Philological Sciences (1981), graduate of the University of La Habana and the Máximo Gorki Institute of World Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, in Moscow. Founding Director of the Revista de Literatura Cubana (1982). National Literature Prize 1991. He was a Member of Number of the Cuban Academy of Language, corresponding member of the Spanish Academy, member of the Advisory Council of the Centro de Estudios Martianos, founding member of the Union of Journalists of Cuba and of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), of which he was vice president and member of its National Council for several years. He was Organizing President of the "Nicolás Guillén" Foundation. He was subdirector of the Institute of Literature and Linguistics of the Academy of Sciences of Cuba, which granted him the special category of Research Merit Scholar.

Ángel Augier was born in the Santa Lucía sugar mill, municipality of Rafael Freyre, province of Holguín.

At the beginning of the 1930s, the first poetic works of Ángel Augier are recorded while he was studying Philological Sciences, in which he earned his doctorate from the University of La Habana and also trained at the Máximo Gorkí Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. He worked as a journalist and literary critic in the Cuban capital, especially for the newspaper El Mundo and was a professor of the graphic arts workshop in La Habana before the revolution against Batista. Afterward he continued at El Mundo and founded the Prensa Latina news agency. Co-founder of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba, —of which he was vice president for fifteen years—, and of the Revista de Literatura Cubana which he directed, he was a member of the Academy of Sciences of Cuba and of the Cuban Academy of Language.

A specialist in the work of Nicolás Guillén and Rubén Darío, and in the figures of José Martí and José María Heredia, he was a visiting professor at the various Cuban universities, as well as those of Sevilla and Santiago de Compostela in Spain, at the University of Burdeos (France) and at various British universities. He is considered a central figure in contemporary Cuban literature. In 1991 he was awarded the National Literature Prize.

He was coeditor of Cuban literary journals and editor or contributor to major periodical publications in other countries. He was founding assistant of the Office of the Historian of Ciudad de La Habana, head professor of the Graphic Arts Workshop of the Industrial Technical School "José B. Alemán" and Editor-in-Chief (founding) of the Prensa Latina News Agency and of the newspaper El Mundo.

He traveled to numerous countries in America, Western and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia. He was a UNESCO fellow for literary studies in París; he participated in congresses of unions of writers from socialist countries and in some of those of the International Association of Literary Critics, of which he was a member.

He gave lectures on Cuban literature topics at the University of La Habana, UNEAC, Casa de las Américas, University of Oriente, of Santiago de Cuba (which granted him the special teaching category of visiting professor), at other Cuban cultural institutions, at the universities of Sevilla and Santiago de Compostela, in Spain; of London, Bristol, Warwick, Great Britain, and Burdeos, in France, as well as at the Maison de l'Amérique Latine in París.

The State Council of the Republic of Cuba granted him in 1982 the National Order "Félix Varela" of the first degree, and the Ministry of Culture and other national institutions conferred upon him honorary distinctions, including provincial ones from the Popular Power of Holguín, Camagüey, Villa Clara and Sancti Spíritus.

He has been included in numerous anthologies of Cuban poetry in our language and in translations to other languages.

He passed away on Wednesday, January 21, 2010. Augier himself believed that his most significant poetic work was his book Isla en el tacto, made up of poems written, fundamentally, in the initial period following the triumph of the Revolution.