Nicaraguan William González wins the Hyperion for Poetry with a work that pays tribute to migrants

The Nicaraguan poet William González, in Madrid. Alfredo Urdaci

The young Nicaraguan poet William González (Managua, 23 years old) has won the Hiperión Poetry Prize this Tuesday for his work

, which delves into the lives of migrant women and their strenuous efforts to support their families in Spain.

The award jury has highlighted that González "insists and expands his theme on the world of the dispossessed, and especially the dispossessed, immigrant women with whom we live without paying much attention and whose lives have no echo in the world of poetry".

It is an intimate and autobiographical portrait, in which González pays homage to her mother, a migrant from Nicaragua who arrived in Spain at the beginning of 2000 to work as a domestic worker.

“It is a recognition of her and of the Latin American migrant women, who are exploited at work,” González says in a telephone interview.

This is the first time that a Central American poet has won the Hiperión Poetry Prize,

The jury, made up of the poets and writers Ariadna G. García, Benjamín Prado, Jesús Munárriz, Francisco Castaño and Ben Clark, highlighted that González's is a "necessary poetry, because it stems from the need to give voice to make visible those who remain in the blind spot of our satisfied gaze, who never wonders how the hospital where they treat me, the office where I work, the house I live in are clean.

Nor what is there beyond the bright shopping streets, the wide avenues, the squares with pigeons.

Who lives and how on the outskirts of history”.

The decision of the jury for the delivery of the XXXVIII Hiperión poetry prize.

The young poet has received the news of the award "with great satisfaction" because, he says, it is a "great recognition for Nicaragua, Central America and Latin America."

González defines his poetry as social, because in it he addresses the problems that affect migrants.

Being himself the son of migrants, González has been interested in the difficult conditions in which they work in Spain.

“The fundamental axis is my mother, a domestic worker, who arrived at the beginning of 2000 to clean houses.

The book delves into domestic workers, poverty, the marginalization of neighborhoods and death, because my mother has faced a very physical job that has made her bones age, despite the fact that she is in her fifties, her bones are those of an 80″ woman, explains the poet.

“It's very low-paid physical work,” he adds.

Marginality is a subject that the young poet had already dealt with in his first feature,

, by immersing himself in a complaint about the problems faced by migrants, food delivery workers, street vendors and impoverished young people who must resist every day. to day in a European country that turns its back on them.

The book, which won the Antonio Carvajal Young Poetry Award, has as its "main success to avoid both the prosaic document and the pathetic tear to deliver a lyrical testimony full of the future", it is stated in a review published by Luis Bagué Quílez in

.

William González with a copy of his book 'The nobodies'. Alfredo Urdaci

González explains that the migration has been “very hard”.

A painful uprooting, despite having arrived in Spain as a child: he had to leave his friends, school and start from scratch in a strange country.

In addition, in solitude, because his mother left home every day at seven in the morning and did not return until late at night, also working on Saturdays and Sundays "to make ends meet."

He took refuge in poetry, he says, with Rubén Darío and Ernesto Cardenal as leading figures.

“Poetry is my life, not an outlet, it is my day to day”, he affirms.

"Poetry has always been there as the maximum representation of the beauty of language," he adds.

The news of the award has generated reactions among the two most prominent Nicaraguan writers, Gioconda Belli and Sergio Ramírez.

“A piece of news today on Poetry Day: William González, from Nicaragua, has won the prestigious Hiperión poetry prize.

Congratulations to William for his second important prize in Spain, where he reached the age of ten ”, Belli wrote on Twitter.

“El Hiperión, one of the most important poetry prizes in Spain, has been won by the Nicaraguan William González.

What joy and what pride ”, Ramírez said on his part.

González says that he will continue to write denunciation poetry, which pays attention to the unprotected.

“I do it from reason, from common sense.

I speak it from my origin, because I see my mother suffer.

You have to live it to tell it.

I am not going to distance myself from reality, because my poetry will always be linked to what I have experienced”, affirms the young poet.