Daína Chaviano

Daína Chaviano (Spanish: [daˈina tʃaˈβjano]) (born 19 February 1957, Havana, Cuba) is a writer of French and Asturian descent. She has lived in the United States since 1991.

Quotes

• I’m more worried about exploring new subjects and places that give me interesting information, than speculate about what other people can think or say about my work. Life is getting shorter and shorter and I want to make the most of mine.
  • Interview (2017)

• I would like my readers to levitate when they read the novel. I believe that there is too much violence and coarseness in the world, not just in books, but on television as well. People become degraded when they overuse these things. As I writer, I feel it is my challenge to come up with a phrase that can convey all the anguish a human being feels and to express it in a poetic way. Literature becomes simplistic when two out of every three words are vulgarisms. It requires no effort on the part of the creator or the reader.
  • Interview (2007) Translated from the Spanish

• In life, reality and fantasy are blended, and I deliberately look for that connection in my work. It gives me pleasure to do so
  • Interview (2007)

Interview (2019)

• Cuba is a ghost that feeds my literature...The seedling of what I am today took root on that island. But, that Cuba no longer exists, except for in my memories and my generation’s collective imagination. This is why it is a mythical and real land at the same time, which continues to sustain my ideas and dreams.

• Exile was where I was able to complete the amended or mutilated spaces that I was still missing to understand Cuba’s history. My novels, riddled with ghosts, journeys in time, mythological reinterpretations, are how I try to give a coherent image so as to reconstruct that incomplete reality which I was shown.

• Man is a political animal in certain societies, but it is also an emotional and imaginative animal in any context. Its spirituality is a lot more powerful and omnipresent than politics. My characters might be influenced by political events, but politics isn’t what governs in their lives, but spirituality. A citizen in any Western country could describe themselves as a political animal”; but a druid priest, masai or pygmy in Africa, an indigenous person from the Caribbean in pre-historic times or even the Amazon today, doesn’t follow these parameters. According to these cultures, the spirit and emotions are a lot more important.

Quotes about

• It’s as if Ray Bradbury had married Michael Ende and occasionally flirted with Anais Nin.”
  • Criticas magazine (US, Jan/Feb 2004), quoted here