Introduction
In this month’s La Española, we’re focusing on the high calibre literature coming out of Las Islas Canarias, an archipelago in the Atlantic, 100km off the coast of Morocco. The main economic activity is tourism but in previous centuries the Canaries were a regular stopping point for invaders, traders, and seafarers, including Christopher Columbus on his way to the Americas, and Horatio Nelson who lost an assault (and an arm) on Tenerife. Over 100 years of resistance by the indigenous Guanches eventually gave way to the Crown of Castile in the 1400s.
Though it’s an autonomous community of Spain, the Canarian dialect has more in common with the grammar and pronunciation of South American and Caribbean Spanish; both heavily influenced by Canarian migrants from 16th-20th centuries. Since 1999, the Academia Canaria de la Lengua has been tasked with documenting and promoting the islands’ language and, this year, in a boost to single Canarians, the distinctive Canarian speech (which sounds most similar to Puerto Rican) was voted the sexiest Spanish accent by users of the Adopte dating app.
Historically, the islands’ literary canon has not been sufficiently recognised within, or outside, wider Spanish culture, for example, the pioneering feminist novels of the courageous Tinerfeña, Mercedes Pinto deserve wider renown. Even within the Canaries, the larger islands such as Gran Canaria tend to dominate so the smaller islands like Lanzarote, where I live, have been somewhat overlooked, although this has been changing in recent years. For example, on Lanzarote, the home of Nobel winning writer, José Saramago, has become a museum and, in 2022, a sculpture was installed to honour Gregorio Fuentes, the Arrecife-born sailor who inspired Hemmingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.
Contemporary writing, too, has burgeoned into a proud and vibrant ‘scene’ with the booksellers and publishers on Lanzarote forming a group, Isla literaria, to promote literature through initiatives like the Feria del Libro, now in its second year. In addition, the newly established Asociación de Escritores de Lanzarote promotes and celebrates the island’s writers and, since the pandemic, several annual literary fixtures have begun, for example, the Festival de Literatura de Lanzarote, also Letras Aisladas, and Verbena. With a track record of showcasing and supporting its visual artists, Lanzarote now embraces its literary past and present, too.
It is clear that literature on these islands has a long, solid history, and thanks to this and many contemporary initiatives, it continues to thrive. It has been too long in coming that the literature produced by Canarian writers gets better recognition both in Spain, and the rest of the world. With this overview of literature from Las Islas Canarias, we offer you just a snapshot of the range of writing emerging from the islands, as we explore nine writers from Lanzarote, Gran Canaria, and Tenerife.
Introduction by Kate Tough
www.katetough.com
Part one. Lanzarote.
Our first stop is Lanzarote, where we start our journey across Las Islas Canarias with Daniela Martín Hidalgo, a poet born in Lanzarote who has spoken of poetry as ‘a field of tensions that are not resolved in the poem itself. Since 1997 she has published multiple collections, including 2023’s well-received, La piel, la pulpa, el gusano, la semilla. In her essay of 2021, Poesía es un lugar, Martín Hidalgo questions the relationship between real and symbolic places and writing; noting how, in-between consideration and description, the landscape and individual are reflected in each other. Bruno Mesa echoes this, commenting that her poetry, ‘creates an intermediate place between language and life, a threshold between intention and chance, where being and belonging are united.’ Examining her 2003 poem, ‘Una Foto’, Mesa notes that time corrupts memory in the same way that a house becomes ruin, a house that is also our body. As Recaredo Veredas states, ‘her verses enchant with a strange and attractive rhythm, in one of the most singular voices in poetry today.’
Macarena Nieves Cáceres is another poet born on Lanzarote and she has been writing, editing, and involved in feminist action since university. Her many publications include 2022’s celebrated collection, ‘Aquellar de la lluvia’. Her elemental, honest poems are short or comprised of short sections and careful line spacing, with motifs such as debris, sirens, cities, lovers, drought, rain, and sacred symbols which explore themes of remembrance and absence, female desire and touch, childhood and middle age, firmly influenced by the island’s contradictory landscape that is dry yet life sustaining. According to Ángel Sánchez, the work of Macarena Nieves is, ‘at least a voluntary attempt to lighten the weight of adversity … diluted with the commonness of humans.’ For him, her poems show ‘their feelings, their vital rhythmic cadence, to lift our spirits and to believe in a future that can be remedied.’ You can read the poem ‘cartographies’, by Macarena Nieves Cáceres, here.
We finish our express visit to Lanzarote with Carlos Battaligni, an author and poet born and raised on Lanzarote, who, after forging a career in other countries, is back on the island. His first work, the short story collection, Me voy de aquí, made him the best-selling Canarian author at the Las Palmas Book Fair in 2020. Battaligni says, ‘My characters are somewhat out of place, looking for their space in the chaos of life. All of them try to change, some with more luck than others, but all of them try.’ His second book, a collection of poetry, Otras Hogueras, also brought him success, with a significant number of glowing reviews and sales. Jesús Urceloy described Battalini’s poems as, ‘proposing a most singular experience; a necessary journey within the impossible frontiers of life and the elements that surround it.’ Samantha is his latest publication – a risky and passionate theatrical work about a ten-year old girl during the Cold War – which has already received important praise. Battaligni was a finalist in the third Pérez-Taybilí Short Story Prize and has participated in various collective works such as Antología de poesía (Ediciones Plutonio, 2020) and Canarias en verso. Keep an eye out for a future interview with Carlos in La Española for an insider’s look into the literary landscape of Las Islas Canarias.
Part two. Gran Canaria.
Moving east, to the island of Gran Canaria, we find Paula I. Nogales Romero, a philologist and secondary school teacher. As part of the so-called ‘last generation of the millennium’ in Canarian poetry, she has developed a remarkable poetic career, with titles such as Recintos, Saludos de Alicia, Manzanas son de Tántalo, Esta falacia que se desangra impune, Vicios ocultos, and De la traición como arte. Nogales has also appeared in various national and international anthologies. As a writer, she has published two short story collections, Zapping. Cuentos and Sociedad anónima. Zapping. Cuentos was awarded second place on the City of Santa Cruz de Tenerife Prize and Sociedad anónima was awarded first place on the Ateneo de la Laguna Prize for Short Stories. Her most recent book is Excusatio non petita. Poemas y otras pruebas inculpatorias. Her short story, ‘I was the happiest girl in the world’, which you can read here, takes place in the Vegueta district of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in which Nogales grew up, and is told through the voice of a young girl whose eyes are opened onto her surrounding world in this colonial neighbourhood. This district of the Columbus era is where the city’s founding hill is situated, along with the buildings that housed its first civil and religious authorities. Here, between the beautiful squares scattered around the Santa Ana Cathedral and the charming alleys in which fear also dwells, the story unfolds.
Miguel Ángel Sosa Machín is a historian and writer born in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in 1955 and holds a degree in Philosophy and Arts from the University of La Laguna. Involved in the fight for LGBTQI+ rights and one of the founding members of the Colectivo Canario de Homosexuales, he is also an advocate of historical memory, issues that in one way or another permeate his writings. He was a secondary school teacher and a member of the Advisory Council of the Hipatia Library Programme, whose aim was to promote reading. Among his most celebrated titles is the novel Viaje al centro de la infamia, which recounts the sufferings endured by homosexuals and other prisoners held in the Colonia Agrícola Penitenciaria de Tefía in Fuerteventura during the Franco regime. This novel delves into the dark repressive plot of a dictatorial regime that for decades made many aspects of freedom impossible.
Finally, on Gran Canaria, we meet the writer, Alicia Llarena, a Doctor in Spanish Philology at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria where she has been a professor of Hispano-American Literature since 2003. As a researcher and critic her studies focus on Cuban poetry from the 80s, magical realism, and prominent writers such as Pino Betancor and Mercedes Pinto. Yo soy la novela, which studies the life and work of Mercedes Pinto, won the Canarian-American Special Research Prize. Since the early 1990s, Llarena has cultivated her literary creation in the fields of poetry and short story. As a poet, she has published Vuelo libre, Fauna para el olvido, El arte de las flores secas and El amor ciego. Although her prose work is not quite as extensive, she has participated in various collective volumes and is the author of Impresiones de un arquero anotable book of short stories that was published in the early 1990s. In the short story, ‘Kain with a C’, which you can read here, she tells the story of a millennial love affair, loyalty, and betrayal that moves between frivolous television sets and the tourist hotspots of the island. The epitome of sun and beach tourism, in reality, the south of Gran Canaria offers much more than all-inclusive hotels and shopping centres. It being her district of origin, Llarena knows the south well, and in her fiction offers a trail for those who want to travel a little further than a tour operator allows.
Another writer from Gran Canaria to note is Meyrem el Medhati, author of the super successful debut Supersaurio, who featured in our magazine The Spanish Riveter, in the article ‘Spanish Women to Watch’. You can find the article here.
Part three. Tenerife.
We finish our journey across some of the Canarian islands continuing east, where we find the island of Tenerife and the poet and writer Cecilia Domínguez Luis, who studied Hispanic Philology at the universities of La Laguna and Madrid. She has been secretary of the cultural publication Fetasa and president of the Ateneo de La Laguna and has contributed poetry and critical works to numerous cultural publications in the Canary Islands. In 1980 she won the Matías Real poetry prize, in 1981 the Pedro García Cabrera poetry prize, and in 1991 the Emilio Algaba Guimerá poetry prize awarded by the Casa de Venezuela in the Canary Islands. In 2011 she was made a full member of the Academia Canaria de la Lengua and in 2013 a member of the Instituto de Estudios Canarios. In 2015 she was awarded the Premio Canarias de Literatura and in 2023 she was honoured on Women Writers’ Day.
The next writer we find on Tenerife is Yeray Barroso, who has a degree in Spanish Language and Literature from the University of La Laguna. He has published three books of poetry, and with Ceremonia he won the Nuevas Escrituras Canarias prize. He was the literary editor of Josefina Zamora’s short stories in La mirada infinita. Cuentos reunidos and dedicated his final degree project to Félix Francisco Casanova with El don de Vorace: novela lírica y actitud posmoderna. Very active in the promotion of Canarian literature, he participates in meetings and projects such as Deletrando Canarias, of the Biblioteca de Canarias.
Finally, we end our whistlestop tour of three of Las Islas Canarias with Nayra Bajo de Vera who was born in Barcelona in 2000 to a Canarian mother and a Catalan father, before finally settling in Tenerife in 2007. She studied Journalism at the University of La Laguna and later a master’s degree in Media, Diversity and Power at the Pompeu Fabra University. She published her first novel, Vida at the age of 19, which won first place in the LGBTQI+ prize from the Town Hall of La Laguna. In 2023 she published a poem in the multigenerational anthology, Te pondrán flores en el estómago, published by Ediciones La Palma. Part of her writing deals with the identity conflict that comes from being Canarian and Catalan, whilst other topics she often deals with are mental health, feminism, migrations and LGBTQI+ narratives. She has been taking part in literary meetings since 2020 to promote young Canarian literature.
In this brief overview of Canarian literature, we have only dipped our toes into the vast sea of writers that surround and inhabit Las Islas Canarias. If these writers and their poetry and short stories have piqued your curiosity, then you should explore the database of writers that the Biblioteca de Canarias has put together. This comprehensive resource includes bios and information about writers from across all eight islands that make up the region – not just the three we have featured here. Also, keep an eye out for the interviews coming up with Carlos Battaligni a Canarian authors with whom we will find out more about the literature being produced on the islands.
By Alice Banks and Kate Tough
Kate Tough is an author and prose editor with Action, Spectacle arts magazine. She’s the co-ordinator of the Society of Authors’ local group for Spain and also sits on the committee of the PD James Memorial Fund at the SoA. She’s received three Creative Scotland funding awards for fiction and poetry, and been selected for literature residencies at Cove Park, Vermont Studio Center, Outlandia and Moniack Mhor. She’s a children’s literacy volunteer and chairs festival events. Her novel, Keep Walking, Rhona Beech (Abacus) came out in 2019. Her short stories are collected in, Kissing Lying Down (Picón, 2022), and first appeared in journals such as, The Brooklyn Review, The Texas Review and Broadkill. Her poem ‘People Made Glasgow’, was included in the shortlist of an established UK poetry prize in 2022 (under a pen name), and was selected as a Best Scottish Poem 2016 and her poetry pamphlet, tilt-shift, was Runner Up in the Callum Macdonald Memorial Award, 2017, and mentioned in the Times Literary Supplement’s notable pamphlets, 2017. She was an invited poet in The Edwin Morgan Trust’s International Translation Workshop, in 2019.
Alice Banks is a creative and literary translator from French and Spanish based in Madrid. After studying the MA in Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia, Alice began working with the European Literature Network as an Editorial Assistant. She also volunteers as a copy editor for Asymptote Journal and is a publishing assistant at Fum d’Estampa Press.
Read previous posts in La Española series:
LA ESPAÑOLA: Riveting Writing from Spain with Alice Banks & The Spanish Riveter. Latin American Focus
LA ESPAÑOLA: Riveting Writing from Spain with Alice Banks. June – Feria del libro, Madrid
LA ESPAÑOLA: Riveting Writing from Spain with Alice Banks. May – Non-fiction
LA ESPAÑOLA: Riveting Writing from Spain with Alice Banks. March: From Ukraine to Spain
LA ESPAÑOLA: Riveting Writing from Spain with Alice Banks. February: Spain, a nation of booklovers
LA ESPAÑOLA: Riveting Writing from Spain with Alice Banks. December: Galician Focus
LA ESPAÑOLA: Riveting Writing from Spain with Alice Banks. November Author focus: Elizabeth Duval
LA ESPAÑOLA: Riveting Writing from Spain with Alice Banks. October: Basque Focus
LA ESPAÑOLA: Riveting Writing from Spain with Alice Banks. Las Sinsombrero
LA ESPAÑOLA: Riveting Writing from Spain with Alice Banks. July: Crime and Thriller Writing
LA ESPAÑOLA: Riveting Writing from Spain with Alice Banks. June: The Short Story
LA ESPAÑOLA: Riveting Writing from Spain with Alice Banks. May: Contemporary Fiction
LA ESPAÑOLA: Riveting Writing from Spain with Alice Banks. April: Catalan Focus