Marvel Moreno

Introduction

Published in Colombia and Spain and translated into French and Italian, the Colombian writer Marvel Moreno (Barranquilla 1939–París 1995) realized a body of work powerful enough to arouse widespread acclaim among writers, artists, critics and students from very diverse countries, but she has yet to receive the recognition her assiduous readers believe is her due. Her stories and novels describe the mutation of a patriarchal system confronted with creeping modernization in a society contradistinguished by neo-colonial dependency and underdevelopment, progressively broadening their focus to encompass the general crisis in values and behavior of western society.

It is difficult to categorize Marvel Moreno: she was the upper middle class female who broke with her class; the beauty queen who wrote in secret; the Caribbean native in a country of suffocating Andean domination. Heir to the tropical culture, she embodied a world impossible to reduce to one regional dimension: a Colombian woman living in Paris, a female writer with no place in the feminist catalogue, a contemporary of the authors of the “boom†but distant from them in terms of subjects and favored forms.

The attention that her books are receiving from her contemporaries, from critics and among university students and academics is but the first step in a new phase opening up in the study of her writings. Her work has outgrown the confines of sporadic recognition from writers, translators, filmmakers and college students and is ready to assume a clear place in the history of Spanish language literature. Today it is essential to attempt to place her work not just in the literary sphere of her Caribbean world, her feminine world, her nation and her continent, but also in the wider panorama of contemporary international literary production.

This web page is part of the project The Evolution of Creation. Marvel Moreno: Writing, Memory, Time, winner of the 2004 National Research Grant in Literature of the Ministry of Culture of Colombia awarded to Yohainna Abdala Mesa, who is a doctoral candidate at the university of Toulouse-Le Mirail and is currently an (ATER) lecturer at the Department of Romance Languages of University Lumière Lyon 2 in France.