Marilyn Bobes

Marilyn Bobes León (born María de los Ángeles Bobes León; 1955 in Havana, Cuba) is a Cuban poet, novelist, literary critic and editor.

Bobes began her studies at University of Havana in 1974 and earned a bachelor's degree in History in 1978. She continued her professional life as a journalist working for major news outlets such as Prensa Latina and the magazine Revolución y Cultura. She made her debut in the field of poetry when her collection of poems La aguja en el pajar (published in 1979) won the David Literary Award for Poetry in 1979.

Later, in 1996, her collection of short stories, Alguien tiene que llorar (published in 1995) won the award Casa de las Américas. This same year, Bobes published Estatuas de sal with Mirta Yáñez, a Cuban philologist, teacher and writer. Estatuas de sal was the first collection of fiction of Cuban female writers.

She won the award Premio Latinoamericano de Cuento Edmundo Valdés in Mexico in 1993 and Premio de Cuento Hispanoamericano Femenino Magda Portal in Peru in 1994 for her poem "Alguien tiene que llorar."

Furthermore, between 1993 and 1997 she served as vice president of the Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba, UNEAC). In an interview she mentions she left UNEAC because she believed she could make a change in the world more effectively through her writing.

She was married for six years to the writer Jean Portante from Luxembourg. They met at a poetry festival in Macedonia.

Early life and education Marilyn Bobes began writing her first poems when she was about twelve or thirteen years old. During her teenage years, her mother showed Bobes' poems to the now deceased poet Roberto Branly (her neighbor's friend). He advised Bobes to attend literary workshops at the Brigada Hermanos Sainz, an organization that unites young Cuban writers and artists. She contends that winning the "Premio David" award marked her official entrance into the Cuban literary world. Most of the people she worked with in the Culture department of Prensa Latina were women, while all her bosses were male. She then published another poetry collection, Hallar el modo, in 1989. The title of this collection alludes to Rosario Castellanos' famous poem, "Meditación en el umbral," and has thus been seen as consciously feminist. In her most known story within this collection, also titled "Alguien tiene que llorar," Bobes presents a group of friends who are all coming to terms with and voicing their distinct opinions about the suicide of a woman named Maritza. Set in Cuba during the 90s (The Special Period), the novel explores the inner world of a woman in her forties who has just divorced for the second time. Fiebre de Invierno alludes to pop culture references such as Sex and the City and figures including María Braun and Emma Bovary.

Anthologies Bobes has dedicated a lot of her writing to increasing the visibility of Cuban women writers. She put together an anthology with Mirta Yáñez of Cuban women writers called Estatuas de Sal published in 1996. She explains that women were largely excluded in the literary world especially in Cuba before the 1990s, and thus this anthology is the first time in Cuba that a book compiles women's fiction exclusively. Bobes and Yáñez characterize this work as a "literary panorama." She sees this work as being a crucial starting point that put pressure on the very masculine world of literature.

Bobes also published a few other anthologies of women writing including Eros en la poesía Cubana (1995) and Cuentistas Cubanas inquietantes: antología sobre infidelidad (2003). She also compiled an anthology specifically about Alfonsina Storni called Entre el largo desierto y la mar (1999) and another one called Sombra seré que no dama: Antología poética (2000) containing poetry by Carilda Oliver.