Mylene Fernández Pintado Cuba

Mylene Fernández Pintado (Havana, 1963) is a Cuban writer and lawyer who has received some of Cuba's most prestigious literary awards.Her first novel, Otras plegarias atendidas (Altre preghiere esaudite, Marco Tropea Editore, 2004), won the Italo Calvino Prize (ARCI–UNEAC) in 2002 and subsequently the Italian Critics’ Prize (Premio della Critica Letteraria) in 2003. The book explores the theme of emigration and is structured in three parts, like an airline ticket: Havana-Miami-Havana, the cities where the story unfolds. Fernández Pintado’s personal trajectory, like that of many of her compatriots, is inextricably linked to the turbulent history of her island, which she deeply loves and which is the central protagonist of her writing. A versatile author, she captures the many facets of contemporary Cuban literature, focusing in particular on migration as a space of possible futures, on exile imbued with nostalgia for the past, and on ethnicity shaped by transculturation, a term coined by the Cuban thinker Fernando Ortiz in 1940. She has often been described as a ‘borderland writer’, as her voice transcends physical boundaries. She has always travelled extensively; when she was a child, her father’s work often took him abroad for extended periods, and she accompanied him. Now, she resides between Havana and Lugano. Several of her works have been adapted for cinema, theatre, radio and television in Cuba and Mexico. In Italy she has published the novel L’angolo del mondo (La esquina del mundo) with Marcos y Marcos (2017) and the short-story collection Un lungo addio / Un largo adiós.

© Paolo Gebhard