Zoé Valdés
Zoé Valdés (born May 2, 1959 in Havana, Cuba) is a Cuban novelist, poet, scriptwriter, film director and blogger.
[6] She published her first poem when she was 19 years old in El Caimán Barbudo, a literary magazine created and funded by communist youth.
[8] She later received her degree in Philology at the Universidad de La Habana and then continued her studies at the Alliance Francaise in Paris.
[8] In 1990 she received the award Primer Premio Coral for the best unreleased screenplay for her script, Vidas paralelas at the XII Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano.
[6] As an open opponent of the Castro regime, Valdés always wanted to change the political scene in Cuba from within the country through her writing.
[11][12] In 1995 she left the country and moved to Paris with her husband at the time, the filmmaker Ricardo Vega, and her daughter Attys Luna, who was one and a half years old.
[11] She moved to Paris because she had an invitation from the Escuela Normal Superior to start a series of conferences about romantic poetry with Jose Martí.
[11] When her first novel La nada cotidiana came out in France, and she began to give interviews about her work, the regime in Cuba forbade her to return to the country.
[6] Valdés made her debut in literature as a poet when in 1982 she won the award Primer Premio de Poesía Roque Dalton y Jaime Suárez Quemain for her poetry collection Respuestas para vivir.
[6] Her second collection of poems, Todo para una sombra received an accessit in the contest Premio Carlos Ortiz de Poesía in Spain in 1985.
[8] Valdés wrote the screenplay for Vidas paralelas (1993), which tells the story of a man, Andy, who lives in Habana and dreams of moving to the United States.
[15] Valdés' narratives are known for their semi autobiographical nature and their themes of nostalgia, sexuality, eroticism and masculine fragility.
[11] Her work has been translated into English, German, Flemish, Polish, Portuguese, Italian, Serbian, Czech, Slovakian, among other languages.
It was also later published in Spain, Sweden, Holland, United States, Portugal, Brazil, Greece, England, Turkey, Australia and Switzerland.
[20] She published an article in El Mundo about Fulgencio Batista where she declared that he was an antifascist and argued that rather than carrying out a coup d'état, he started a revolution.
[33] She has generated great controversies publishing dozens of articles attacking several authors and public figures, and even opponents of the Cuban regime such as multi-awarded blogger Yoani Sánchez,[34][35] artist and activist Tania Bruguera,[36] Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg,[37] Spanish author Almudena Grandes,[38] and others.
