Nicaraguan poet and novelist Gioconda Belli, one of Latin America’s best-known literary voices and a longtime critic of the government of Daniel Ortega, which stripped her of citizenship and forced her into exile, is making headlines again with a candid reflection on the state of imagination today.
In the interview, Belli suggests that modern society has largely stopped picturing genuinely different worlds—politically, socially, or environmentally—and instead remains fixated on managing the crises already in front of us. For a writer whose career has long blended personal history with utopian and political themes, from the Sandinista revolution to feminism and ecology, the observation carries weight: without the ability to envision alternatives, she implies, real change becomes harder to pursue.
Belli’s remarks touch on literature’s role as a space where new futures can first take shape, and on why that creative risk-taking feels increasingly rare in an era dominated by immediate anxieties—economic uncertainty, climate change, and political polarization among them.
Her comments arrive as she continues to write and speak from exile, using her platform to question not just Nicaraguan politics but broader cultural habits of thought across the Spanish-speaking world and beyond.
To read Gioconda Belli’s full reflections in her own words, check out the original interview at El Universal.
Image: quinn.anya, BY-SA 2.0 (via Openverse).