Literature is a defense against AI’s “mechanical word,” Gioconda Belli says

Gioconda Belli accepted the 2026 FIL Prize for Literature in Romance Languages with a warning about a world increasingly filled with distractions and machine-generated language.

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We’re in a world so full of distractions, with an increasingly short attention span, that I think fighting for reading is fundamental for me.

The Nicaraguan writer said literature must encourage people to read and offer them another way to see the world. “We’re in a world so full of distractions, with an increasingly short attention span, that I think fighting for reading is fundamental for me,” she said at the prize announcement in Guadalajara.

Belli described the current period as difficult because of fears that human language could be replaced by what she called a “mechanical word.” She argued that artificial intelligence draws on human intelligence and the information people have given those systems.

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These artificial intelligences, if we think about it, are our intelligence, what has filled those machines with information and what they know, we have given them without asking permission.

The jury praised Belli for renewing literary language and called her one of the most powerful voices among contemporary Latin American writers. It also highlighted the political dimension of her work, which has been shaped by Nicaragua’s major political upheavals and influenced generations of readers and writers.

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I started writing poetry as a celebration of my body without realizing that it would be subversive.

Belli said her writing began as a celebration of her body, before she understood that such work could be subversive. She connected that experience to women’s need to affirm themselves and reject discrimination. Her opposition to the government of Daniel Ortega and Rosa Murillo has led to exile in Spain since 2022, a different experience from her earlier exile in Mexico in 1975. “I’m not alone even when I’m alone, because I have all that experience and that desire,” she said.

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I’m not alone even when I’m alone, because I have all that experience and that desire.