The Casa de las Américas Prize is a Cuba

Cuba

The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...

n cultural award given by the Casa de las Américas

Casa de las Américas

Casa de las Américas is an organization that was founded by the Cuban Government in April 1959, four months after the Cuban Revolution, for the purpose of developing and extending the socio-cultural relations with the countries of Latin America, the Caribbean and the rest of the world...

, an organization founded in April 1959. It is one of Latin America’s oldest and most prestigious literary awards.

Some of the scholars and writers who have won this prize are Edward Brathwaite, Humberto Costantini

Humberto Costantini

Humberto "Cacho" Costantini was an Argentine writer and poet whose work is filled with the rich slang of Buenos Aires. Except for his years of exile in Mexico, his life was lived in and around Buenos Aires....

, Roque Dalton

Roque Dalton

Roque Dalton García was a Salvadoran poet and journalist. He is considered one of Latin America's most compelling poets...

, Eduardo Galeano

Eduardo Galeano

Eduardo Hughes Galeano is a Uruguayan journalist, writer and novelist. His best known works are Memoria del fuego and Las venas abiertas de América Latina which have been translated into twenty languages and transcend orthodox genres: combining fiction, journalism, political analysis, and...

, Renato Prada Oropeza

Renato Prada Oropeza

Renato Prada Oropeza was a Bolivian and Mexican scientist-literary researcher and writer, author of novels, short stories and poetry books, hermeneutics, semiotics and literary theory. Many of his literary works have been translated into several languages...

, Susana Rotker, Françoise Perus, Beatriz González-Stephan and Luis Britto García

Luis Britto García

Luis Britto García , is a Venezuelan writer, playwright and essayist. His narrative has been awarded twice with the Casa de Las Américas Prize, for his works Rajatabla and Abrapalabra . In 2002 was prizewinner of the National Prize for Literature...

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Awards are given out for poetry, narrative, essay, and testimonio, among other categories.

Since 1976 there has been a jury for Caribbean

Caribbean

The Caribbean is a crescent-shaped group of islands more than 2,000 miles long separating the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, to the west and south, from the Atlantic Ocean, to the east and north...

 literature in English or pidgin

Pidgin

A pidgin , or pidgin language, is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common. It is most commonly employed in situations such as trade, or where both groups speak languages different from the language of the...

 English. The first novel to win a prize from the Caribbean was Ikael Torass by N. D. Williams

N. D. Williams

N.D. Williams was born in Guyana in 1942. He went to Jamaica as a student to study at University of the West Indies at Mona in 1968. As a student he witnessed the riots following student demonstrations against the banning of the late Dr. Walter Rodney. This is now referred to as the Rodney riots...

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