The novelist in exile affirms that “writing is a refuge. I would be more miserable living outside of Nicaragua if I weren’t a writer.”
HAVANA TIMES – Nicaraguan author Sergio Ramírez, winner of the prestigious Cervantes Prize in 2017, said that in literature the big themes are love, madness, death, and power, and he is interested in all of them, but power is his “great fascination.”
“In literature, the fundamental themes are few but essential: love, madness, and death, and there’s one other very important one in Latin America, which is power,” said Ramírez, who participated this Friday in the city of Malaga (southern Spain) in the third literary festival of America and Europe ‘Escribidores’.
“I’m interested in all themes, but power is my great fascination, how it is carried out for those who have it and those who don’t, and the innocent victims of excessive and arbitrary power,” he added.
Furthermore, “people suffer separations, imprisonment, or death, their lives change, and that subjugation of lives to power is fascinating,” says Ramírez, who has been living in exile since 2021 due to political persecution by the Nicaraguan government of Daniel Ortega. He now holds Spanish national