The Modern Novel

Biography

Yolanda Oreamuno was born in San José, Costa Rica in 1916. Her father died before her first birthday and she was brought up by her maternal grandmother. After high school, she studied book-keeping and then worked for the Post Office. She published her first story when she was twenty, She worked in the Chilean Embassy where she met the diplomat, Jorge Molina Wood. They married and the couple moved to Chile. However. her husband killed herself after getting an incurable disease, and she returned to Costa Rica.

The following year (1937), she married a lawyer who was a Communist sympathiser. She became involved in Communist activities and in anti-Franco and pro-Spanish Republic issues. She continued to write and published and wrote her first novel Por tierra firme. She entered it in a competition in 1940 and it shared first prize. She was not happy with the decision and did not send it to a publisher. The manuscript was subsequently lost.

In 1942 her only a child, a son, was born but the marriage was breaking up and the couple finally divorced. She travelled to Mexico and then moved to Guatemala, where she took Guatemalan citizenship. Her novel La ruta de su evasión [The Route of Her Escape] was published in 1948 but, the following year, she became very ill and spent four months in a hospital in Washington. She then moved to Mexico, where she died in 1956. No inscription was placed on her grave site till 2011. Various portraits were made of her including this one, this one and this one.

Other links

Yolanda Oreamuno
Yolanda Oreamuno
Yolanda Oreamuno (in Spanish)
Yolanda Oreamuno (in Spanish)
Yolanda Oreamuno (in Spanish)
Yolanda Oreamuno: la escritora que se adelantó a su época (in Spanish)
Yolanda Oreamuno, la escritora que cambió el rumbo de las letras costarricenses (in Spanish)
Una place para Yolanda Oreamuno (in Spanish)