Rafael Soto Verges

Rafael Soto Verges was born in Cádiz, Spain in 1936, studied business and
liberal arts, and won the Adonais Award in 1958 for his book of poetry La
agorera (The Fortune-Teller). Among his many books of poetry are
Rimado bajo el piélago (Rhyme Book beneath the Sea, 1993, Cáceres City
Award), El discurso de yerba (Grass Speech, 1994, Andalusian Critics
Award), Manual de prodigios (Handbook of Miracles) Madrid: Devenir,
1999, which received the Vicente Gaos Award, 1997, and Pasto in llamas
(Pasture in Flames), Soria: Diputación Provincial, 2000, Leonor Poetry
Prize, 1999, and Las deleterias areas (The Lethal Areas, 2003, Andalusian
Aljabibe Award). Soto Vergés died in July, 2004. Spanish Critic Ricardo
Guillón declared in his Dictionary of Spanish and Spanish American
Literature that Soto Vergés was “one of the first to anticipate, through
symbolic empowering, the renovating formulas of the realism prevalent at
the end of the Fifties.” One English translation of a poem from the
Handbook appeared in Illuminations (2005), two in a 2003 issue of The
Bitter Oleander and five of these translations were featured in Madrid’s
multilingual poetry magazine, Equivalencias.