(Amalfi, Colombia, 1951). She holds a degree in Philosophy and Literature from the University of the Andes and a Master’s degree in Theory of Art and Architecture from the National University of Colombia. She taught for three decades at the University of the Andes. She has published nine books of poetry and several anthologies. She is also a playwright and the author of six novels, a memoir about the death of her son, Lo que no tiene nombre —named in 2016 by Babelia, Spain, as one of the 100 best books of the last 25 years— and an autobiographical work, La mujer incierta. In 2026, she published La voz de las cosas, a book of poems and drawings. With El hilo de los días, she won the National Poetry Prize awarded by the Colombian Institute of Culture (Colcultura) in 1994; in 2011, with Explicaciones no pedidas (Unsolicited Explanations), she won the Casa de América Prize for American Poetry in Madrid; in 2012, in Aguascalientes, Mexico, she won the Víctor Sandoval Prize, as part of the Latin World Poetry Encounter, for the contribution her poetry has made to the Spanish language; in 2014, the José Lezama Lima Prize awarded by Casa de las Américas; in 2016, the Generation of ’27 Prize in Malaga, Spain, for the book Los habitados; in 2024, the 33rd Queen Sofía Prize for Ibero-American Poetry; and in 2026, the Exlibris Prize for Literature in Murcia, Spain. Her novel Qué hacer con estos pedazos was one of the five books shortlisted for the 2023 Mario Vargas Llosa Biennial Novel Prize. Lo que no tiene nombre has been translated into French, German, Danish, Dutch, Italian, Greek, Norwegian and Arabic. Her poems have also been translated into various languages.
