Nicolás Guillén

Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista was born on 10 July 1902 in Camagüey, Cuba, of mixed African and Spanish descent. His father, a journalist, introduced him to Afro-Cuban music when he was very young. He began studying law at the University of Havana but left in 1921 to devote himself to writing.

His poetry was published in magazines from the early 1920s, and in 1930 he released his first collection, Motivos de son. Inspired by the Afro-Cuban son, a popular musical form, and by the daily lives of Black Cubans, and strongly shaped by a meeting that year with the American poet Langston Hughes, it created an international stir. It was written in an Afro-Cuban vernacular that departed from the Spanish literary canon and helped establish Black culture as a legitimate subject of Cuban literature.

He followed it with Sóngoro cosongo (1931) and West Indies, Ltd. (1934), in which his poetry grew sharper in its criticism of racial and economic oppression. In 1937 he joined the Communist Party and made his first trip abroad, to a congress of writers and artists in Spain. His political writing led to several arrests, and he lived in exile during the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.

After the 1959 revolution Guillén returned to Cuba, where he was named National Poet in 1961 and became the first president of the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba, a post he held for around thirty years. He remained a member of the Communist Party's Central Committee, and his later collections, including Tengo (1964) and El gran zoo (1967), took up themes of revolution and social change.

Guillén wrote around sixteen collections of poetry and more than twenty-five long poems, and is considered a master of the Afro-Cuban style. He received the Lenin Peace Prize and the Botev International Prize, and was the first winner of Cuba's National Prize for Literature in 1983. He died in Havana on 16 July 1989, aged 87.