Marvel Moreno

Marvel Luz Moreno Abello (Barranquilla, Colombia, September 23, 1939 - Paris, June 5, 1995) was an influential Colombian writer. In the 1960s who became associated with the so-called Barranquilla Group, which included some of most important figures in Colombian culture at the time. Moreno was chosen by Cromos magazine as "one of the hundred most influential women in the history of Colombia."

Biography

She was the daughter of Benjamín Jacobo Moreno and Berta Abello Falquez, and sister of Ronal Moreno Abello, one of the promoters of science fiction in Colombia. She was part of a traditional wealthy family from Barranquilla a port city in the northern region of the country. In October 1939 she was baptized as a Catholic. In 1950, Moreno was expelled from a convent school for voicing a defense for Charles Darwin and his theories of evolution against the doctrines of the Catholic Church. In 1956, at 20, her mothers encouraged her to join a beauty pageant and she was named the queen of the Barranquilla Carnival, an important folk festival in the country. For a few weeks, she became "the most important character in the city and for some days he enjoys notoriety in the entire country."

As an adult, Moreno became the first woman with the Faculty of Economics at the Universidad del Atlántico.

In the early sixties she met Alejandro Obregón, an important painter in Colombia, with whom she developed a deep friendship that lasted until her early death. Through him, she got to know other members of the Barranquilla Group, including Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, Gabriel García Márquez as well as Germán Vargas Cantillo who would become a decisive figure for her as a young writer.

In 1962, Moreno married her first husband, the journalist Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, and they had two daughters.

She moved twice to Paris, first in 1969, where she began to write and publish her first stories in magazines. At some point she moved to Spain and in September 1971 returned to Paris where she was to remain.

Until 1972, Moreno contributed to Libre, a literary magazine in Spanish that brought together resident Latin American writers or those exiled in Paris.

The author's publications included the stories Something so ugly in the life of a fine lady (1980) and The Encounter and other stories (1980). Critics have said, "In her work the influence of writers such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Carson McCullers and William Faulkner is noted, but in all her work the background is Latin American culture."

While living in Europe where she spent the last 30 years of her life, she won two prestigious awards, including the Italian Grinzane Cavour Prize for "best foreign book" in 1989 for The breezes returned in December. Seven years later, her first novel appeared: In December the Breezes Arrived, in which her style, inherited from magical realism, matured into "a new dimension of the marvelous reality" as the critics described it.

In 1982 she married the French engineer Jacques Fourrier.

Works (all from sp wiki)

In 1969 she published his first short story, El Muñeco, in the magazine Eco and later in the Sunday Magazine of El Espectador. In 1975 she published her second story, Oriane, Aunt Oriane, also in the magazine Eco. In 1980 she published the story La noche feliz de Madame Yvonne, which she wrote in 1977, the same year in which she began to write In December the breezes arrived, a novel that completely absorbed her for seven years. It was published in 1987 by Plaza & Janes.

From 1983-1985, the filmmaker Fina Torres created her first movie, Oriana, based on the Moreno's second story, and the film went on to win the Caméra d'Or award in Cannes, France as the "best first feature film." The story was described by critic Vincent Camby in The New York Times as a "Gothic Romance" featuring a woman and her French husband who return to South America to sell the home of an aging aunt, Oriane. The story also includes flashbacks to the woman's youth in the beach town and troubles that had been long-forgotten there. It also won Best Film and Best Screenplay in the Cartagena Film Festival and it was also selected as the Venezuelan entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 58th Academy Awards, but was not named a nominee.

Moreno's novel, translated into Italian, In December the Breezes Come received the Grinzane Cavour literary prize for the best foreign book in 1989. She managed to publish in Bogotá an anthology of short stories that she had started in 1986, entitled The Encounter and Other Stories, under the Áncora Editores publishing label.

The rights to Moreno's latest novel, The Time of the Amazons, have been reserved by her two daughters and her first husband, Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, since she finished writing it in 1994, a year before she died. Finally, it was scheduled for publication in March 2020. (According to El Tiempo, the consensus in international literary circles was that Moreno's novel, with a main character said to resemble her ex-husband, was kept "on file for 26 years" by Moreno's daughters and Mendoza and was moved into publication only "after years of political and academic pressure," something that the family has denied.)

Death

Moreno died in poverty on June 5, 1995, in Paris from lupus an illness that was accompanied by depression and led directly to her early death at age 56, of pulmonary emphysema. Fulfilling her wishes, her body was cremated at the famed Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, and her ashes thrown into the Seine River.

Hours before she passed, she had managed to write the first lines of a story titled "Un amor de mi madre." Upon her death, her work became more relevant. As a posthumous tribute to the writer, Jacques Gilard organized an international colloquium at the University of Toulouse in 1997. Her stories, including the first lines of the final text, were compiled in the volume "Cuentos Completos," published by Editorial Norma in 2001, within the collection La otra Orilla.

Publications

Stories

• Something so ugly in the life of a fine lady, 1980
• The encounter and other stories, 1992
• Complete stories, 2005

Novels

• In December the breezes arrived, 1987, reissued in 2005 and 2014
• The time of the Amazons, 1994, edited in March 2020

Accolades

In 2004, Moreno was the winner of the National Literature Research Prize awarded by the Colombian Ministry of Culture to Yohainna Abdala Mesa. ??

External links

• The digital version of In September Marvel arrived online: https://www.flipsnack.com/suazavar/en-septiembre-llego-marvel-fdpig8a3z.html

List of Latin American writers List of Colombian writers List of Colombian people