About me

Yaumara Sanabria Llanes was born in 1979 in Florida, in the province of Camagüey, Cuba, the second daughter of Mariluz Yánez and Armando Sanabria. She grew up among books, chessboards and horror films: three different ways of learning that no game is lost until the final move, and that what frightens us usually has an explanation far more human than it first appears.

That childhood left her with two certainties. The first: that literature and fantasy are not a refuge from the world, but the instrument with which we learn to look at it. The second, more stubborn, took hold in her adolescence — she wanted to create something of her own. A character who would be a woman, and who would be luminous. Not a tragic heroine, nor a victim granted a kind ending, but a protagonist carrying the whole story on her shoulders, because it is women who give everything in life, and that truth deserved a character equal to it at last.

The idea took years to find its shape. It found it in Abril Evans.

Yaumara is a doctor of medicine. She has spent half her life caring for bodies, and has seen at close range what medicine cannot reach: imagination going out, creativity given up for lost, the soul that falls ill too when it stops being astonished. That is why she writes. Her novel is meant to travel as far as it needs to — from a girl of eight to a woman of ninety — because the need to believe in something has no age, and the heart opens just as readily at eight as at ninety.

“Abril Evans: Human or Mermaid?” is her first book. It will not be her last.

At a glance

• Born in 1979 in Florida, Camagüey (Cuba)
• Doctor of medicine
• Fantasy and fiction
• Literature, chess and horror cinema