The court made up of writers Nancy Morejón (president), Olga Marta Pérez, Marilyn Bobes, Rafael Acosta and Jesús Lozada met this Tuesday at the Dulce María Loynaz Cultural Center in this capital.
According to the minutes of the meeting, in addition to an indisputable stylistic skill through which she breaks certain urban myths, Llana Castro’s characters take an unprecedented look at the Havana social environment.
“Her voice has contributed to the formation of later creators whose center is established in the most refined tradition of a literary vocation at the service of noble causes and in favor of the imagination, as well as good work,” the document notes.
The radio and television scriptwriter, professor of journalism and radio techniques, is considered one of the most important contemporary Cuban storytellers and her second book, ¨Casas del Vedado¨, received the National Critics Award in 1984.
Born in the city of Cienfuegos, on January 17, 1936, her work has been collected in anthologies inside and outside Cuba, and translated into several languages.
From 1959 to 1992 she worked in newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and in the Prensa Latina Information Agency, media where she served as a desk editor, reporter, critic of theater, radio, television, plastic arts and literature, as well as a specialist in issues of international policy.
In 1959 she began working at the newspaper Revolución; but she quickly joined the newspaper La Tarde until she started at Prensa Latina in the second half of the 1960s.
She was a journalism professor in Angola in 1987, and correspondent for Agencia Prensa Latina in Beijing, China, between 1989 and 1992, in addition to holding different positions in the agency, as well as in some of its publications such as Prisma and Cuba Internacional magazines.
During her career she obtained important awards from the Union of Journalists of Cuba and the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television.
Throughout the 50s and 60s of the last century she wrote stories that would make up ¨La reja¨, her first notebook of stories, and which appeared in 1965, published by Ediciones Revolución.
After 20 years she released her second book of stories, ¨Casas del Vedado¨, which was published in 1983, which won the Literary Criticism Award and is recognized by scholars of Cuban literature as one of the emblematic texts of that period.
In 1998, ¨Castle of Cards¨ appeared, a book in which the fantastic and the non-realistic predominate, as well as the poetic of the need for human beings to overcome their own limits and go beyond their logical-conventional constraints, according to specialists.
In 2011 she published ¨Dreams, Scares and Surprises¨, her first book for children, which she followed in 2014 with the novel ¨From Mars to the Park¨.
According to the usual mechanisms, the high recognition granted by the Cuban Book Institute will be given to María Elena Llana during the Havana International Book Fair, the next edition of which will take place from February 15 to 25, 2024.
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