Marvel Moreno

• Name — Marvel Luz Moreno • Born — September 23, 1939 • Birthplace — Barranquilla, Colombia • Died — June 5, 1995 • Place of death — Paris, France • Occupation — Writer • Mother — Berta Abello • Father — Benjamín Jacobo Moreno • Awards — Grinzane Cavour Prize for "best foreign book" in Italy (1989)

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. At the age of 20, her mother encouraged her to join a beauty pageant and she was subsequently named the queen of the Barranquilla Carnival, an important folk festival in the country and one of the biggest carnivals in the world. 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 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 in her life by eagerly encouraging her writings. In 1962, Moreno married her first husband, the writer and journalist Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, and they had two daughters.

She went 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." In 1982, she married the French engineer Jacques Fourrier.

Moreno died in poverty on June 5, 1995, in Paris while suffering from lupus, an illness that was accompanied by depression and that may have led 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 managed to write the first lines of a story titled Un amor de mi madre. In 1997, as a posthumous tribute to the writer, Jacques Gilard organized an international colloquium at the University of Toulouse. Moreno's 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.

• 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

• 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.

The authorities additionally record the heading Marvel Luz Moreno Abello. Her recorded language was Spanish. She married Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza.