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Hilma Contreras

May 30, 2019

Contreras was born in San Francisco de Macorís, Dominican Republic, in 1913 and was educated in Paris, where she began to write in the 1930s; she is considered the Dominican Republic’s first short-story writer. Her literary career began in 1937 with the publication of the short stories “Tarde de cristal” and “Los Buenos se van” in the Listín Diario newspaper; these were followed by her first short-story collection Cuatro cuentos in 1953 and El ojo de Dios: cuentos de la clandestinidad, a decade later. She pubished her only novel La tierra está bramando in 1986 and in 1987 her third short-story volume, Entre dos silencios. Hilma Contreras was awarded the Premio Nacional de Literatura in 2002, bestowed to a woman for the first time in that edition. She passed away in her city of birth in 2006.