Sofía Castañón

Sofía Fernández Castañón (born 1 November 1983) is a Spanish poet, writer, audiovisual producer, and politician. She has worked in print, television, and radio, and received several poetry prizes. Since January 2016 she has been a member of the Spanish Congress of Deputies for Podemos, representing Asturias, and since 2020 she has served as deputy spokesperson for the Unidas Podemos Confederal Parliamentary Group. In December 2021 she was elected leader of the regional branch of the party, Podemos Asturies. Furthermore, since 2017 she has been a member of the party's national board, where she has served first as Secretary of Intersectional Feminism and LGTBI and currently as Secretary of Cultures. One of Sofía Castañón's grandfathers was a foreman of mines, and her family comes from the Cuencas Mineras. The daughter of Asturian writer Laura Castañón, she grew up surrounded by books. She studied Spanish Philology at the University of Oviedo, and combines her poetic activity with journalistic work and creative writing workshops. She has published several books of poetry in Castilian and Asturian, for which she has received awards such as the Asturias Joven in 2006, the Pablo García Baena de Poesía Joven in 2007, and the Nené Losada Rico in 2009.From 2009 to 2010 she was a scholarship holder for the City Council of Madrid in the Residencia de Estudiantes, and was one of La Casa Encendida's 2010 Voz + Joven poets.

In 2010 and 2011 she directed the radio show El sillón Voltaire on Radio del Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid.

From 2012 to 2015 she coordinated municipal reading clubs in Gijón and gave workshops on literary creation and audiovisual narrative, as well as participating in the humorous collective Fundición Príncipe de Astucias (now Fundición Princesa de Astucias).She participates in the audiovisual production company Señor Paraguas, for which she has created music videos, documentaries, and video art, focusing on culture from a social and political perspective.She directed her first feature film with this company in 2014, the documentary Se dice poeta. In it, Castañón interviews 21 women born between 1974 and 1989 to discuss their relationship with poetry, criticism, and the dissemination of their work. Taking as a starting point the question about why the term poetess may be preferred if the definition of the word poet encompasses both men and women, this documentary looks at the role of gender in the current poetic panorama in Spain. In the media she has worked at Televisión Local Gijón, Localia, and TeleAsturias.

For Televisión del Principado de Asturias (TPA), she directed the collection Dicires, a visual dictionary of Asturian in 120 clips. She has also written articles for media outlets such as El Comercio, La Corriente Alterna, La Nueva España, Hesperya, Diagonal, and the Huffington Post.