La Jornada: The writer Sergio Ramírez will occupy the L chair of the RAE

The Nicaraguan writer and academic Sergio Ramírez, 2017 Cervantes Prize winner, was elected yesterday by the plenary session of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) to occupy chair L, vacant since the death of Mario Vargas Llosa, on April 13, 2025.

His candidacy was presented by the director of the institution, Santiago Muñoz Machado; Víctor García de la Concha, former head of the RAE and the Cervantes Institute, and Luis Mateo Díez, Cervantes Prize 2023.

In order to take possession of the plaza, as established by the statutes and regulations of the RAE, Ramírez must read his entrance speech into the corporation.

Author of more than 70 books (novels, stories, chronicles and essays) and translated into around 20 languages, he participated in the revolution that overthrew the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza in 1979.

The narrator has resided in Madrid, Spain, since 2021, in exile, after being stripped of his citizenship by the administration of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.

He is also a full member of the Nicaraguan Academy of Language. He has been a visiting professor of literature at the University of California, Los Angeles, Harvard University, and Princeton University. He is also founder of the Centroamérica Cuenta Literary Festival.

In addition to the Cervantes, in 2011 he was awarded the José Donoso Ibero-American Literature Prize, for his entire literary work.

Three years later, he received the Carlos Fuentes International Prize for Literary Creation in the Spanish Language and, in 2021, he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Círculo de Bellas Artes of Madrid.