Catz Fellow publishes major volume on Latin American poetry

Ben Bollig, Professor of Latin American Literature and Film, and Fellow and Tutor in Spanish at St Catherine’s, has co-edited a major new academic volume offering one of the most comprehensive accounts to date of twenty-first-century Latin American poetry.

Published by Routledge, The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Latin American Poetry brings together more than thirty international scholars to explore the voices, movements and cultural forces shaping poetry across Latin America and its global diaspora.

The project, co-edited with Jorge J. Locane (University of Oslo), represents several years of collaborative research and provides a wide-ranging overview of poetry written since 2000, a period marked by profound social, political and technological change.

At its core, the book challenges traditional ways of thinking about Latin American literature. “Latin American poets, writing from Latin American perspectives, can be found across the globe,” Professor Bollig explains. “It was important for us to recognise that poetry is not confined to national borders, but exists across different countries, languages and communities.” Rather than organising poetry solely by nation, the Companion adopts a broader perspective, reflecting how contemporary poets often live and work outside their countries of origin. Latin American poetry is now written and performed in cities including London, Berlin and New York, shaped by migration, translation and new forms of cultural exchange.

The book examines these developments alongside major thematic and stylistic trends, including Indigenous poetry, feminist writing, queer voices and ecological concerns. This diversity, Professor Bollig suggests, is one of the defining characteristics of contemporary poetry.

“In poetry today, the diversity of styles, voices, modes of circulation and formats is remarkable,” he says. “There isn’t a single dominant movement. Instead, there are many different approaches, reflecting the complexity of the world poets are responding to.”

The Companion also explores how poetry is evolving beyond traditional publishing. While books remain important, poetry increasingly exists through live readings, performance, digital media and informal publishing networks. In many cases, these forms play a central role in how poetry reaches audiences and creates communities.

This reflects poetry’s longstanding position as both an artistic and social practice. Unlike the novel, which is closely tied to the commercial publishing industry, poetry often circulates through smaller, independent networks, maintaining a distinctive cultural role.

One of the book’s key aims is to address the relative lack of international attention given to poetry compared with prose fiction. Latin American literature is often defined globally by its novelists, yet poetry remains fundamental to literary life across the region. By bringing together new research, the Companion seeks to expand understanding of this tradition and to highlight poetry’s continuing influence.

The book also captures a moment of transformation, as poets experiment with new forms while engaging with urgent contemporary issues, including environmental change, political identity and social justice.

Professor Bollig’s work reflects his longstanding research into modern and contemporary Latin American literature, as well as his commitment to teaching and mentoring students at St Catz. The College congratulates Professor Bollig on this achievement, which represents a significant contribution to the field.

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The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Latin American Poetry is available now from Routledge.

Find out more about Professor Bollig’s work, here.

Listen to Professor Bollig on the Poetry Worth Hearing podcast, here.