Canarian poet, essayist and translator. Professor of Literature and one of the most important voices in contemporary Spanish poetry.
Andrés Sánchez Robayna was born in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in 1952. From an early age he showed a literary vocation connected both to the tradition of Western poetry — from Góngora to Mallarmé — and to the volcanic, luminous landscape of the islands. He studied Hispanic Philology and gained his doctorate at the University of Barcelona, where he came into contact with the most innovative poetic movements of the 1970s. He returned to the Canary Islands to work as a professor of Spanish Literature at the University of La Laguna.
His poetic work is built on the dialogue between light, silence and the word. Books such as En el cuerpo del mundo (2004) or El libro, tras la duna (2002) explore the sensory experience of the archipelago and the relationship between the poem and the act of knowing. Sánchez Robayna has also developed an enormously wide range of essay and translation work: he has rendered into Spanish fundamental poets such as Rimbaud, Leopardi, Paul Celan and Wallace Stevens, introducing them into the Hispanic cultural space with philological care and literary brilliance.
He is one of the most internationally translated and recognised Spanish poets. He has received the National Critics' Prize, the Canarias Prize for Literature and numerous international awards. His anthologies and essays have shaped a vision of Canarian poetry as an Atlantic phenomenon of universal projection. Now in his seventies, he continues to publish, to teach, and to be a central voice in the literary debate in Spanish.