“To have one’s country taken away, to have the doors of return closed, will always be a sorrow. One must know how to endure it,” says the writer from exile.
HAVANA TIMES – Nicaraguan author Sergio Ramírez “lives” in Nicaragua through his literature, even in his most recent book, despite his exile since 2021 and the loss of his nationality, which he refuses to relinquish, as it is in that “imaginary” country where his childhood, life, and memories remain.
“My writing always returns me to the lost country, which becomes an imaginary country. Everything that is in memory is imaginary. One reconstructs, and what one does not remember, one invents. That is the writer’s craft,” said the Cervantes Prize winner in an interview with EFE.
“I can say that I always live in that country (Nicaragua) through literature,” Ramirez notes from Panama for the XI edition of Centroamérica Cuenta, the largest itinerant literary festival in the region, dedicated this year to the Nicaraguan-Salvadoran poet Claribel Alegría.
This event, founded by Ramírez in Managua in 2013, is being held for the first time in Panama from Wednesday to Sunday, bringing together important Latin American writers such as Gioconda Belli, Leonardo Padura, and Horacio Castellanos Moya, among others.
Sergio Ramirez, Denationalized and in Exile
In 2023, the Nicaraguan government, led by Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo, stripped him of his nationality —along with 94 others— but two years earlier, a detention order had been issued