# Cuban poet Pérez Boitel wins Nicolás Guillén poetry prize

**Date:** 02/03/2020

With the book La naturaleza del estío, Cuban poet Luis Manuel Pérez-Boitel won the Nicolás Guillén National Poetry Prize 2020.

The award, which is granted by the Instituto Cubano del Libro and the Letras Cubanas publishing house, will be presented to him at the venue of the twenty-ninth International Book Fair of La Habana, which will begin next February 6.

Residing in the city of Remedios, 44 kilometers northeast of Santa Clara, capital of the province of Villa Clara, Pérez Boitel is an acclaimed Cuban poet who in 2002 won the Casa de las América Prize with the poetry collection "Aún nos pertenece el otoño".

"A prize with the name of Nicolás Guillén is like returning to the work of that great Cuban poet, and a way of understanding the great paths of poetry in recent years," said to Prensa Latina the Member of Honor of the Unión Hispanoamericana de escritores.

The volume "La naturaleza del estío", the bard from Remedios values as a return to island-themed poetry, of great significance throughout verse in Cuba, and which writers with a very peculiar work and a temporality throughout the centuries have deepened.

"This has legitimized it as a song to the land and to our small city, which is our country," he noted.

Pérez Boitel highlighted that the poetry collection addresses the theme of insularity, rooted in some elements that have to do with his favorite authors and emotionally-tinged poetry that seeks the intellectual within a book of about 100 stanzas.

He discovered that one of his poems is titled "En conversación con Lezama" (José Lezama Lima) which justifies that poetic style that was legitimized by the Orígenes group under the pretext of island theology, which is nothing more than strengthening from the island the best that can mean and raise a landscape where Cuban values are prioritized.

Pérez Boitel also won in 2007 the Marius Sampere International Poetry Award in Barcelona, Spain, and the Manuel Acuña 2013 International Poetry Prize in Mexico.