The Sky Weeps for Me

Sergio Ramírez was born in Masatepe, Nicaragua in 1942. His first book was published in 1963; the following year he earned a law degree at the University of Nicaragua. Returning after a lengthy voluntary exile in Costa Rica and Germany - during which he continued to write works of fiction and nonfiction - he became active as the leader of the Group of Twelve, consisting of intellectuals, businessmen and priests united against the Somoza regime. With the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution in 1979, he became part of the Junta of the Government of National Reconstruction, where he presided over the National Council of Education. He was elected vice-president of Nicaragua in 1984, an office he held until 1990. He continued to serve as the leader of the Sandinista block in the National Assembly until 1995, when he founded the Movement for Sandinista Renovation (MRS). In 1996, however, Ramirez retired from politics. His outspoken opposition to the Ortega dictatorship, along with the publication of Tongolele no sabía bailar, resulted in an arrest warrant in 2021 and his subsequent exile to Spain. In 2023 his citizenship was stripped and all of his property confiscated by Ortega's government. Sergio Ramírez is the author of thirty books, only ten of which have been translated into English. In 2017 he was awarded the Cervantes Prize, Spanish literature's highest literary award. He has also received Spain's Dashiel Hammet Award, France's Laure Bataillon Award, Cuba's José María Arguedas Latinamerican Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Alfaguara International Novel Award. Ramirez is a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres of France, and a doctor honoris causa of Blaise Pascal University (France). He has received the International Prize for Human Rights awarded by the Bruno Kreisky Foundation, as well as the Order of Merit of the Federal Government of Germany. He held the Robert Kennedy Professorship in Latin American Studies at Harvard University in 2009.