Colombian literary figure Piedad Bonnett has received the 23rd Federico García Lorca International Poetry Prize, earning one of the Spanish-speaking world’s premier honors for her lifetime contribution to verse. Granada Mayor Marifran Carazo announced the decision on Oct. 13 after a jury meeting at the Federico Garcia Lorca Center in the southern Spanish city. The award drew candidates from 14 Spanish-speaking countries.
Bonnett, 75, said she was astonished by the news, particularly because she had received another major Spanish literary award less than a month earlier. “I’m astonished, but above all, this prize moves me because it is the Garcia Lorca,” she told the EFE news agency, adding that it had previously gone to “very good” writers.
The poet also welcomed the recognition as a sign that her work is reaching more readers abroad. She said the awards offer audiences in Spain and across Latin America more opportunities to discover Colombian literature. That visibility matters, she added, because it is not easy to draw international attention to Colombian poetry beyond the country’s most famous cultural figures.
The jury praised Bonnett’s ability to write about loss, fear, fragility, the contradictions of love and the difficulty of living without sentimentality. Jordi Doce, representing the Fundacion Federico Garcia Lorca, highlighted her ability to approach complex subjects through simple, direct language.
How Bonnett’s poetry has evolved
Born in Amalfi, Antioquia, in 1951, Bonnett published her first poetry collection, De circulo y ceniza, in 1989. Since then, she has published works across genres—including poetry, novels, plays and nonfiction—centered on themes such as childhood, love, violence, urban life and loss.
Her poetry collections include El hilo de los dias (1995), which received Colombia’s National Poetry Prize in 1994, and Todos los amantes son guerreros (1998). Explicaciones no pedidas won the Casa de America Prize for American Poetry in 2011. In her 2021 poetry anthology, Lo terrible es el borde, themes of knowledge and suffering take center stage. Her 2024 book La mujer incierta revisits her childhood and personal history.
Bonnett says the subjects she writes about change with her life: some return, while others are eventually left behind. Death, however, has remained a constant presence in her thinking. In the EFE interview, she said she had always been conscious of life’s finitude and of death waiting in the background.
That awareness also shapes how she approaches writing. Bonnett described slowness as a way to resist an increasingly noisy world and preserve the attention her work requires. “What I always try to preserve is the slowness my gaze needs and my writing needs,” she said, explaining that she continually struggles to protect that pace from the pressures of the outside world.
The personal grief behind Lo que no tiene nombre
One of Bonnett’s best-known books is Lo que no tiene nombre (What Has No Name), published in 2013. The work recounts the death of her son Daniel, who died by suicide in 2011 at age 28, and examines the questions that remained for his family.
Part personal testimony and part reflection on grief, the book explores the limits of language when a parent tries to understand a child’s death. Bonnett writes about memory, the search for explanations and the difficulty of reconciling the person she knew with the circumstances of his death. Rather than offering simple answers, she confronts the uncertainty that follows a profound loss.
The work illustrates how Bonnett channels personal history into her poetry without constraining it to autobiography. Her poetry and prose approach grief and mortality from different angles, while her broader literary career also addresses love, desire, childhood and the pressures of everyday life.
The Granada jury praised her work for confronting difficult personal experiences without succumbing to sentimentality or abandoning poetic precision.
What the Federico Garcia Lorca Prize includes
Established by the Granada City Council in 2004, the Federico García Lorca International Poetry Prize honors a living poet whose body of work has made a major contribution to Spanish-language literature. Previous recipients include Colombian poet Dario Jaramillo Agudelo, who won in 2018, as well as writers such as Blanca Varela, Ida Vitale and Raul Zurita. Spanish poet Jaime Siles received the 2025 award.
Bonnett said she hoped the recognition would help more people discover the range of literature being produced in Colombia today. For her, the prize offers an opportunity to broaden the international conversation about Colombian writing and bring poetry to readers who might not otherwise encounter it.
The award ceremony is expected to take place in Granada in spring 2027. Alongside a €20,000 prize purse (approximately US$22,400), the prize includes the publication of an anthology of Bonnett’s poetry and a series of literary events dedicated to her work.