Legna Rodríguez Iglesias

Legna is one of the young Cuban writers who won the 2008 Calendario Prize awarded by the Hermanos Saíz Association. She has received several national awards and published more than seven books, including one of children's literature. This young writer is also a specialist in Theater from the Nicolás Guillén School of Art Instructors. In August 2011 she was unanimously awarded the Julio Cortazar Ibero-American Short Story Prize.

Legna has been an enfant terrible since her emergence on the country's literary scene almost three decades ago, sweeping up every award in sight, from Gaceta de Cuba (2008), the Calendario (2010) to the Ibero-American Julio Cortázar in 2011.

Her first book was poetry, Querida lluvia (2002), and she could not stop writing: six or seven more poetry books, then short story collections, including ¿Qué te sucede, Belleza?, (2012) and the novels Mayonesa bien brillante (2012) and La Gran Arquitecta (2013).

Born in Camagüey in 1984, Legna graduated in Theater from the School of Art Instructors in her province. A wanderer, from Havana to Brazil, to the United States: she cannot stay still. In Havana she was welcomed by poet Soleida Ríos, made countless friends, among them essayist and also poet Jamila Medina, Lía Villares, the girls from the duo Jade… In short, she lived in rental apartments, dreamed big amid the most austere living conditions in the capital of all Cubans.

Critic Yoandy Cabrera has said of her: "Like it or not as literature or as a poetic fact, questionable as a lyrical exercise or not, the truth is that Legna Rodríguez's voice is one of the most current and necessary within the Cuban poetic panorama: it reflects generational indifference, the true current concerns of many young people, the vitiated and banal island atmosphere, the equivalence and little importance of all referents whether it be a lettuce or a country's future (…) Legna's is the poetry that is written when it is more important to find the right size in a store than to analyze Derrida. The homeland, the revolution, the royal palm are referents that she desacralizes, trivializing them, questioning the arch-heroism (Tregua fecunda, Chupar la piedra)". "Legna is the social poetry of our time, the colloquialism of the 21st century, as revenge and retribution of the literary conversationalism of the 70s".

Transgressive, irreverent, eccentric, a monster of shamelessness in cultivating immediate circumstance, Legna is also a great worker of words: these can be capricious, smiling, mysterious, and above all fragile: Legna never manages to make them obey submissively. And that is her mission: to achieve the degree of transparency in saying, the desired, longed-for expression and no other. Because they, the words, are treacherous and their complicity with the reader can end up erasing the author in her intention.

The Casa de las Américas Prize 2016 is awarded to her for the work "If this is not a tragedy, then I am a bicycle", Casa de Teatro Prize 2016, a work that impressed "for its poetic level, the excellent construction of its characters" the demanding, experienced, and extremely rigorous jurors such as Santiago director Fátima Patterson, a name of excellence in Cuban performing arts.