Fernando Valverde

Fernando Valverde (Granada, Spain, 1980) is a Spanish poet, writer, and professor. In an international survey of critics and scholars affiliated with nearly one hundred universities—including Harvard, Oxford, Columbia, Princeton, Bologna, Salamanca, UNAM, and the Sorbonne—he was recognized as the most significant Spanish-language poet born after 1970.

His poetry has been published in 25 countries and translated into numerous languages. In 2025 and 2026 alone, twenty-four international editions of his work have appeared, with several more forthcoming across Europe. He has given readings, lectures, and conferences in more than thirty countries.

Valverde has received some of the major poetry awards in the Spanish-speaking world, including the Emilio Alarcos Poetry Prize, the Antonio Machado Prize, the Juan Ramón Jiménez Hispano-American Poetry Prize, and the Federico García Lorca Poetry Prize of the University of Granada. In 2014, he was nominated for a Latin Grammy for a project that brought together poetry and flamenco.

His books in English include The Insistence of Harm and America, the latter published by Copper Canyon Press in a translation by Carolyn Forché. His recent work has undergone an exceptional period of international circulation, with editions appearing throughout Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

For a decade, Valverde worked as a journalist for the Spanish newspaper El País. He is a co-founder of the International Poetry Festival of Granada, one of Europe’s major literary gatherings, which has welcomed more than three hundred writers from around the world, including several Nobel Prize laureates.

He is an Associate Professor at the University of Virginia, where he teaches Spanish literature and creative writing.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic described Valverde as “the most original poet writing today,” while Chilean poet Raúl Zurita has said that Valverde has written “immortal poems.”