Wendy Guerra, formally Wendy Guerra Torres Gomez de Cadiz, is a Cuban poet and novelist. After a brief career acting in Cuban film and television, she turned to writing and won recognition more readily abroad than within Cuba. Her works have been translated into thirteen languages. She has been described as "a kind of diva of contemporary Cuban literature".
Biography
Guerra was born on 11 December 1970 in Havana in what she later described as "a small provincial hospital". Her family soon moved to Cienfuegos on Cuba's southern coast. Her mother Albis Torres was an unpublished poet. Her father was Cuban playwright Raúl Guerra, who died alcoholic and begging for alms on the streets. She has a half brother, plastic artist Sandro Guerra García. Guerra's first collection of poems, Platea a oscuras, won her a prize from the University of Havana. She then earned a degree in film, radio and television direction at Havana's Instituto Superior de Arte. She appeared on Cuba's first morning television show, Buenos Días, where she read children's stories. She worked as an actress on Cuban television and in film, but considers her abilities limited, though she found the experience useful as a student of character and interpretation. Her film credits include Hello Hemingway. She kept diaries that formed the basis for her first novel, Todos se van, which was published in Spain. The novel follows its young protagonist through childhood and adolescence in Cuba. The novel was adapted into the screenplay for a film directed by the Colombian Sergio Cabrera. Cabrera shot the film in Cuba and was later screened at the Havana Film Festival. She received the Carbet des Lycéens prize in 2009. In 2010, France named her a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Guerra published her novel Posar desnuda en la Habana in 2012, after conducted research in Havana and Paris and read Nin's unexpurgated diaries. In the novel, extracts from Nin's diaries are interwoven with fictional entries. In 2013, she published Negra in Spain, a first person narrative of racial discrimination in post-Revolutionary Cuban society. In 2014, she and another Cuban writer, William Navarrete, were prevented from speaking at a literary festival in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, by the government of Bolivian President Evo Morales which anticipated they would criticize Bolivia's suppression of free speech. Later that same year, her novel Posar desnuda en la Habana was published in Cuba, and was presented during the 23rdHavana's International Book Fair. In 2016 Guerra published Domingo de Revolución in Spain, the story of a Cuban author who publishes a book of poems in Europe and is the object of suspicion by both the Cuban government and Cuban dissidents. Guerra's writing has appeared in such magazines as Encuentro, La gaceta de Cuba, and Nexos, as well as in magazines devoted to the visual arts. She has been a guest lecturer at Princeton University and Dartmouth College. She is married to jazz pianist Ernán López-Nussa.
