María Elena Llana

Biography

María Elena Llana was born in 1936 in Villa Clara, Cuba, and moved to Havana in 1940. In 1959, after graduating with a degree in journalism, she worked in different areas of the press, fundamentally Prensa Latina. She specialized in cultural reporting in Asia, which allowed her to attend numerous events with artists and intellectuals in Cuba, Europe and Latin America, and to work in Vietnam and China as a cultural correspondent.

This journalist, foreign correspondent, short story writer and poet began her career in writing with the beginning of the Cuban Revolution and continues to produce today. As a whole, her work represents many of the themes and styles that generally characterize prose fiction written on the island since the onset of the Cuban Revolution in 1959.

Llana published her first collection of short stories in 1965 (La reja). She continued writing during the seventies, but more for herself rather than for publication, as the state favored socialist realist literature over the magical or fantastic during those years. In order to raise her two sons, Llana wrote radio programming, a job she could do from home. Later, thanks to this experience, she would teach radio writing in Cuba and in Mexico. Once back to work, she continued her career as a journalist and short fiction writer.

The debates surrounding what would constitute "revolutionary culture" posited the tension between the realist/utilitarian and experimental/modernist conceptualizations of literature for the social project and the role of the author and artist therein. Llana has successfully negotiated these aesthetic poles throughout the changes in state cultural politics. Marilyn Bobes (Alguien tiene que llorar, Casa de las Américas' Critics prize, 1996) asserts: María Elena Llana is "an essential voice in the contemporary Cuban short story arena." She describes her work as a "configuration of a truly unique and infrequently visited world, and a rarely found thematic and stylistic coherence together with an exemplar mastery of the trade..." (Revolución y cultura 1(1998): 61-2).

Her work includes the collections “Casas del Vedado” (1983, Premio de la Crítica), “Castillos de naipes” (1999), “Ronda en el malecón” and “Apenas murmullos” (2005), and “En el limbo” (2009). She continues to write short fiction and has begun writing children’s novels, publishing her first, “Sueños, sustos y sorpresas” in 2012. Llana’s stories have been collected in the anthologies “Casi todo” (2006, Cuba) and “De pájaros invisibles” (2010, España) and other anthologies in Spanish and in translation. Scholars have studied her work, which has been the subject of doctoral theses in Cuba, Spain, United States and México and articles in literary journals such as the La Gaceta de Cuba and the Latin American Literary Review.

Address in Havana highlights Llana's most critically successful stories, all of which, of interest to this press, have women protagonists at the center of the convergence of narrative times within a limited space—an address in Havana—offering an interesting portrait of the construction of female subjectivity throughout the last fifty years.

Nació en Cienfuegos, provincia del centro del país, en 1936, en el seno de una familia de la clase media que se trasladó a La Habana en 1940. Estudió en colegios católicos hasta el Bachillerato y posteriormente matriculó Periodismo y Artes Plásticas. En 1959, ya graduada, trabajó en todos los medios de prensa, fundamentalmente en la agencia de noticias "Prensa Latina" donde se especializó en temas culturales y asiáticos, por lo cual asistió a numerosos encuentros de artistas e intelectuales en Europa y América y radicó varios años en Vietnam y en China, como corresponsal.

En 1965 publicó su primer libro La reja—cuentos—pero la maternidad reclamó lo suyo y durante años escribió para la radio, labor que la eximía de cumplir horarios fuera de casa. Gracias a esta experiencia, ha sido profesora de técnicas radiofónicas en Cuba y en México. No publicaría otra colección de cuentos durante los años setenta ya que su estilo—lo fantástico—no compaginaba con la línea preconizada del realismo socialista del momento. Reincorporada al trabajo, siguió haciendo periodismo publicando libros de cuentos: Casas del Vedado (1983, Premio de la Crítica), Castillos de naipes (1999), Ronda en el malecón y Apenas murmullos(2005), En el limbo (2009), Sueños, sustos y sorpresas (2012, novela infantil), y las antologías personales Casi todo (2006, Cuba) y De pájaros invisibles (2010, España).

Cuentos suyos aparecen en antologías del género, recopiladas en Cuba y en numerosos países, lo que incluye traducciones. Se han realizado trabajos de tesis sobre su obra en Cuba, España, Estados Unidos y México y crítica que se ha publicado en revistas como La Gaceta de Cuba y Latin American Literary Review.

Listen to an interview and reading by Sara Cooper of An Address in Havana and Ophelias by María Elena Llana and Aida Bahr.(opens in new window)

News Flash: MELL makes Top Ten Summer Reads in Cuba Counterpoints!(opens in new window)