Born in the Cienfuegos province in 1936 and moved to Havana in 1940, María Elena Llana was educated in Catholic elementary and high schools and later studied journalism and art. In 1959, having graduated with a degree in journalism she worked in different areas of the press, fundamentally Prensa Latina. She specialized in cultural reporting and on Asia, visiting Europe and Latin America and working in Vietnam and China. Llana published her first collection of short stories in 1965. Llana's work has been published widely in Cuba and in translation and has been the subject of doctoral theses in Cuba, Spain, United States and México and articles in literary journals such as the La Gaceta de Cuba and the Latin American Literary Review.