Poet, essayist and translator. His extraordinary collections of poems include: Initial Songs, An Island, Los Cuadernos del Destierro (Notebooks of Exile), Falsas Maneubras, Intemperie, Memorial, Amante, Dichitos and Gestiones. For the quality of his work, he has received awards such as the National Prize for Non-Fiction (1984), the National Prize for Literature (1985), the San Juan de la Cruz Prize (1991), the FIL Prize for Literature in Romance Languages (2009), the García Lorca Prize (2015) and the Cervantes Prize (2022), the most important literary prize in the Spanish language. He currently lives in Caracas, a city to which he returned in 1958 after being exiled in 1952 for his communist activism. Regarding his work in Spanish, the critic Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda described him as a 'secret renovator of the language'.
Photo Wikimedia Commons