Uruguay is a country that has produced distinguished poets such as Mario Benedetti, Juana de Ibarbourou, Marosa Di Giorgio, Delmira Agustini, Idea Vilariño or Cristina Peri Rossi. Also to be added to that pantheon is Circe Maia, the recent winner of the Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Poetry Prize 2026. The poet, 94 years old, is an important name in the literature of her country.
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Born in Montevideo in 1932, she had the urge to write from a very young age. In fact, she published her first book of poetry at the age of 12 (Plumitas, 1944). Over time, Maia sees that early publication as a mistake. She commented on this in a 2012 interview with the Periódico de Poesía of UNAM.
“I would see writing as a journey back, rather, a return from what has been lived and what has been read. But maybe you mean that other journey – endless, one-way only – that is made in search of an unattainable perfection. In my case, the journey started very early. Like most children, I discovered poetry in games and songs. Sometimes language appeared as something to be intensely enjoyed. For centuries, in children’s songs, old Spanish romances could be heard – which I believe unfortunately are no longer sung. It was a temptation to invent others, although without singing them, just saying them, and it was already a poem. My father took the trouble to gather and publish them as a little book when I was in my last year of school. I think it was a mistake to publish so early.”
But it was the death of her mother that led her to a more mature and adult poetry, with the publication of En el tiempo (1958). “My first serious book,” she said in an interview. From then on – already a philosophy teacher – she developed a poetic work characterized by being very simple. It does not seek to be complex, but to find depth in what it sings. The beauty of the everyday. “What I try to achieve is transparency, not opacity. If it appears, it is very much to my regret and maybe syntax has something to do with it, but I had not noticed it,” she said in the cited interview.
“I defend myself with a completely everyday language, and if in the end I suggest another problem, in a couple of lines, it may happen that the reader does not even feel addressed and then it seems just a domestic poem, in which I talk about milk, sugar on the table. A friend told me: how nice that I rely on my life as a housewife, to exalt it… (laughs) If I could, and it would not seem too pretentious, I would show philosophical problems that are given in my poems and that few people can notice, because they are not cited,” Circe Maia explained in a 1994 interview with El País Cultural.
For example, in her poem Velocidad creciente, she says: “There is a / sensation that the days pass / faster and that there is no time / for many farewells. / A voice sounds, like an insect / behind the days / and behind the nights / small pecking, but it does not stop / when you want to see, the days crumble / as if they had been devoured from within.”
As happens with poets, Maia has also ventured into translation. She has translated into Spanish, for example, Greek poets such as the famous Konstantino Kavafis. “I am very enthusiastic about contemporary Greek poets. [Giorgios] Seferis was the first I met. I heard him on the radio, a poem in Greek, and from there came my passion for the language,” she said in a 2010 interview with La Diaria. She clarified that the Greek she handles is not ancient. “What I can read and translate is modern Greek.” She has also translated poets from English, such as William Shakespeare.
“When reading poems in other languages, I noticed that when translated literally they disappeared as poems – she said in a 2014 interview with Mura magazine. – But I also realized that this was not always the case, that the poem translated into Spanish remained a poem, although now integrating another universe of sounds and meanings. How is this achieved? It is a delicate task, since the formal elements — a certain structure, a rhythm — typical of each language cannot be left aside.”
“My approach to Shakespeare came from the need to adapt some scenes from The Taming of the Shrew for secondary school students. I then realized that Shakespeare’s blank verse passed without much difficulty into Alexandrines in Spanish.”
For her career, Circe Maia has received various recognitions, among others, the designation as a member of the National Academy of Letters (2008), the Delmira Agustini Medal (2013), the Grand Prize for Intellectual Work from the Ministry of Education and Culture (2014), two Bartolomé Hidalgo awards (2017), and the International Poetry Prize City of Granada-Federico García Lorca (2023). Until 2020 she continued dedicated to writing, translation, and theatrical activity in Tacuarembó, her place of residence.
Among the jurors who awarded her the Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Poetry Prize 2026 is the distinguished Chilean poet Rosabetty Muñoz. Asked by Culto, she ventures to give a characterization of Circe Maia’s poetry.
“It moves me to read her, to discover with her the flashes that illuminate objects, simple and close elements. Her attention to the details of the world manages to penetrate so deeply that her readers feel invited to recover innocence, that initial wonder with which we look at the world.”
“She herself has said that she always wants clarity, never to darken, and in that clarity – which is dense and beautiful – we recognize ourselves. I think of the Ibero-American Prize as an opportunity for many, especially young people and children, to open up the possibility of experiencing the dazzling experience of her poetry.”
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