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Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramírez was named yesterday the winner of the 2017 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world’s highest literary honor. Ramírez has written more than 20 novels, including “Margarita, está linda la mar” (Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea), which won Spain’s prestigious Alfaguara award in 1998. His work has been widely translated.  He has also received Spain's Dashiel Hammet Award, France's Laure Bataillon Award, Cuba's José María Arguedas Latinamerican Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the José Donoso Prize in 2011. A Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres of France, and a doctor honoris causa of Blaise Pascal University (France), he is also recipient of the International Award for Human Rights awarded by the Bruno Kreisky Foundation, and the Order of Merit of the Federal Government of Germany. An active journalist, Ramirez was deputy vice president of Nicaragua between 1984 and 1990 when he abandoned politics and became a full time writer.

Ya nadie llora por mí

  Corruption and power scheming in a police case in which no one is totally innocent. Inspector Dolores Morales has been suspended from the National Police Corps and now works as a private eye. Most of his cases are adulteries of a low income clientele. But a case is going to bring him out of his usual routine: the disappearance of millionaire’s daughter. The case soon turns out to be only the tip of an iceberg in which corruption and the abuse of power that lies beneath the revolutionary discourse of contemporary Nicaragua.

Ramírez, Sergio

Sergio Ramírez (Masatepe, Nicaragua, 1942). Premio Cervantes 2017, forma parte de la generación de escritores latinoamericanos que surgió después del boom. Tras un largo exilio voluntario en Costa Rica y Alemania, abandonó por un tiempo su carrera literaria para incorporarse a la revolución sandinista que derrocó a la dictadura del último Somoza. Ganador del Premio Alfaguara de novela 1998 con Margarita, está linda la mar, galardonada también con el Premio Latinoamericano de novela José María Arguedas, es además autor de las novelas Un baile de máscaras (1995; Premio Laure Bataillon a la mejor novela extranjera traducida en Francia), Castigo divino (1988; Premio Dashiell Hammett), Sombras nada más (2002), Mil y una muertes (2005),La fugitiva (2011), Flores oscuras (2013), Sara (2015) y la trilogía protagonizada por el inspector Dolores Morales, formada por El cielo llora por mí (2008), Ya nadie llora por mí (2017) y Tongolele no sabía bailar(2021). Entre sus obras figuran también los volúmenes de cuentos Catalina y Catalina (2001), El reino animal (2007) y Flores oscuras (2013); el ensayo sobre la creación literaria Mentiras verdaderas (2001), y sus memorias de la revolución, Adiós muchachos (1999). Además de los citados, en 2011 recibió en Chile el Premio Iberoamericano de Letras José Donoso por el conjunto de su obra literaria, en 2014 el Premio Internacional Carlos Fuentes y en 2017 el prestigioso Premio Cervantes.

Castigo Divino, by Sergio Ramírez, appears in English for the first time

Divine Punishment  was published back in 1988 and has been translated into many languages, but never before into English. Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor, it is launched today by McPherson & Co. This publication will be celebrated with appearences of the author and translator at the Americas Society in New York City in association with the Instituto Cervantes. Tomorrow there will be a panel for Sergio at the Instituto Cervantes. Both events are officially part of the PEN World Voices Festival. Upon its original publication, Carlos Fuentes declared Divine Punishment to be the quintessential Central American novel. In this, the greatest work of a storied literary career, Sergio Ramírez transforms the most celebrated criminal trial in Nicaraguan history—the alleged murders in 1933 of two high society women and their employer by a Casanova named Oliverio Castañeda—into an examination of the entire Nicaraguan society at the brink of the first Somoza dictatorship. Passion, money, sex, gossip, political intrigue, medical malpractice and judicial corruption all merge into a novel that reads like a courtroom drama wrapped in yellow journalism disguised as historical fiction posing as a scandal of the first order. “This is a big, beautiful novel –a compelling historical drama of competing narratives and colorful characters that is self-aware and tigned with black humor.” - Publishers Weekly

¿Te dio miedo la sangre?

“Were you scared by the Blood?” written by Sergio Ramirez in Berlin between 1973 and 1975, is a novel whose main characters, as the author makes clear in the prologue to this edition, are “failed conspirators, military men who pay with their lives the uprising, prisoners living in cages next to those of wild beasts, exiles without fortune, wandering hawkers, godforsaken cabaret bartenders, musical trios dragged about by the downpour of violence.” There is also a Miss Nicaragua, who is so thanks to a rigged election result (sad allegory of the generalized fraud of present-day politics), a piñatas salesperson persecuted for sedition, Rubén Darío kept in formaldehyde, another head carried in a bag of line from Honduras, baseball players, boxers, gamblers, prostitutes or healers. And, of course, the man, the dictator that vertebrates from the shadow, and infecting everything of the fierce and dirty darkness he embodies, events, landscapes and biographies. Set in the Nicaragua in-between the cruel transition between the Somoza regime and the Sandinista one, some thirty years of ups and downs and hard clashes (also of hope and heroics), “Were you scared by the Blood?” is an indispensable novel to understand from within how institutionalized injustices produce wounds that only the courage of a people up in arms can heal. Written with great rhythm, lots of humor, ability to analyze, profound empathy and top notch literature, would be the first declaration of engagement by Sergio Ramírez, Premio Cervantes 2017, with a country of which, just after it went to print, he’d become vice-president.

“The Divine Punishment” by Sergio Ramírez 25th Anniversary

This April, the author Sergio Ramírez celebrates the 25th anniversary of the publication of this grand novel "Castigo divino". One of the many activities programmed to celebrate the occasion is the inauguration of the author’s Web page complete with various works available to download; one being the 1st chapter of “The Divine Punishment” (in Spanish). There is also a contest underway in Facebook, as well as the publication of various interviews and in Nicaragua the airing of the television series based on the novel. The author has commented about this celebration: "During this month of April we will be celebrating the 25th anniversary of the publication of my novel "Castigo divino". Originally published by Mondadori in Spain, that same year it appeared in México published by Grijalbo, Editorial Sudamerica in Argentina, Oveja Negra in Colombia, Casa de las Américas in Cuba and Editorial Nueva Nicaragua in Nicaragua. It has been translated into German, French, Dutch, Russian, Bulgarian, Portuguese and recently into English. Alfaguara still has in print, trade and paperback editions, making this a book that has gone from generation to generation throughout the years." "Undoubtedly it has become a classic not to be missed." Antonia Kerrigan.

Edición Conmemorativa de "Un baile de máscaras" de Sergio Ramírez

The Nicaraguan author Sergio Ramírez celebrates his 70th birthday this year and 50 years as an author. There have been a variety of events; presentations, exhibitions and tributes held in honor of this well known award winning author, including the International Alfaguara Novel Award for his title,; “Margarita, the Sea is Beautiful” in 1998. Uruk Editores, Publishing House in San José, Costa Rica published commemorative edition of the novel “ A Dance of Masks”, winner of the 1998 Laure Bataillon Award for the best foreign language translation in France. Regarding this book, Sergio Ramírez commented; “…this is his favorite novel because it’s the story of his childhood, of his family in Masatepe, and the town where he was born.”