Cuban poetess of Canarian descent, Cervantes Prize 1992. Her paternal grandparents were from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
Dulce María Loynaz was born in Havana in 1902, in a family from the Cuban elite with strong ties to the Canary Islands: her paternal grandparents came from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, and Canarian culture permeated her home and childhood. She studied law — she was one of the first Cuban women to graduate — but her real vocation was poetry. She wrote from childhood and published her first important collection, Versos, in 1938, followed by Juegos de agua (1947) and the prose poem Carta de amor al rey Tut-Ank-Amen.
Her work belongs to a tradition of intimate, simple lyricism, remote from avant-garde fashions and committed to the beauty of everyday things: water, gardens, solitude, love and time. Critics placed her for years at the margins of the canon, but her recognition grew until in 1992, aged ninety, she received the Cervantes Prize, the highest award in Spanish-language literature. In her acceptance speech she spoke movingly of Cuba, Spain and the Canary Islands.
Loynaz visited the Canary Islands on several occasions and was received as an illustrious daughter of the archipelago. She died in Havana in 1997. Her figure is today recognised as one of the highest exponents of twentieth-century lyric poetry in Spanish, and the Canarian connection of her family has been a permanent source of pride for Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.