Karla Suárez is a Cuban writer. She was born in Havana in 1969. Since her childhood, she has been passionate about mathematics, writing stories, and music. She studied classical guitar and has a degree in electronic engineering, a profession she continues to develop. Suárez is the author of five collections of short stories and four novels. Her novels received many awards, such as the Lengua de Trapo Prize for her 1999 debut novel Silencios (Silences), for which she was also selected among the ten novelists of the year in 2000 by the newspaper El Mundo; and the Prix Carbet of the Caribbean and Tout-Monde and the Insular Book Prize, both in France, in 2012. Her novels have been translated into several languages. The French translation of Silencios was a finalist for the Insular America Award and Guyana Prize for Literature 2004. Many of her stories have appeared in anthologies and magazines published in Europe, the United States, and Latin America. In Cuba, several of her stories were adapted for television, among them “The Collector.” Her debut short story, “Aniversario” (“Aniversary”), was adapted for the theater. In France, her novel Silencios was adapted for the theater in 2010 and turned into a musical in 2013. Suárez has received several creative grants, including the one awarded by the National Book Center of France (CNL). She has taught writing workshops in Italy, France, and Puerto Rico. She has written for various newspapers, including El País and El informador, and was on the committee of the Juan Rulfo Prize. In 2007, she was selected by the Hay Festival and Bogota World Book Capital, as one of 39 representative young writers of Latin America. She lives in Lisbon, where she coordinates the Reading Club of the Cervantes Institute and works as a writing teacher at the Writers’ School in Madrid. Her latest novel has been published in 2017.
