Marvel Moreno

Marvel Luz Moreno Abello (Barranquilla, Colombia, September 23, 1939 - Paris, June 5, 1995) was a Colombian writer. She was chosen by Cromos magazine as "one of the hundred most influential women in the history of Colombia."

Biography Marvel was the daughter of Benjamín Jacobo Moreno and Berta Abello, 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 a Catholic. In 1950, Moreno was expelled from a convent school for voicing a defense for Charles Darwin and his theories of evolution contradicting the doctrines of the Catholic Church. For a few weeks, she became "the most important character in the city and for some days she enjoys notoriety in the entire country."

In 1962, Moreno married her first husband, the writer and journalist Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, and they had two daughters. At some point she moved to Spain and in September 1971 returned to Paris where she was to remain. The story was described by American 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 named Oriane. The story also includes flashbacks to the woman's youth in a Venezuelan beach town and suggests troubles that had been long-forgotten there.

One of Moreno's novels that was translated into Italian, In December the Breezes Arrived, received the Grinzane Cavour Literary Prize for the "best foreign book" in 1989. In this, her first novel, Moreno revealed her style, inherited from "magical realism" matured into "a new dimension of the marvelous reality" as the critics described it.

Publications

Stories El Muñeco, 1969 Oriane, Aunt Oriane, 1975 (6 editions published between 1986 and 2004 in Spanish and French) Something so Ugly in the Life of a Fine Lady, 1980 The Encounter and Other Stories, 1992 Complete Stories, 2005

Novels En diciembre llegaban las brisas, 1987, reissued in 2005 and 2014 (29 editions published between 1987 and 2014 in 4 languages) El Tiempo de Las Amazonas, 1994, published in March 2020 Her novel December Breeze was published in English for the first time in 2022, translated by Isabel Adey and Charlotte Coombe.