Montero was born in Havana, Cuba in 1952. She is the daughter of Manuel Montero, a very successful Cuban comedic writer and actor who made his career in both Cuba and Puerto Rico, where he and his family relocated when Mayra was a young girl. Manuel, whose pen name was "Membrillo", earned his greatest success playing "Ñico Fernández", a comedic character in Puerto Rican television. This character was a Cuban immigrant with a habit of using hyperbole to describe his homeland and all things Cuban.
Mayra has lived in Puerto Rico since the mid 1960s. She studied journalism in Mexico and Puerto Rico and worked for many years as a correspondent in Central America and the Caribbean. She is presently a highly acclaimed journalist in Puerto Rico and writes a popular weekly column "Antes que llegue el lunes" (Before Monday arrives) in El Nuevo Dia newspaper.
All of her books are written originally in Spanish and have been broadly translated to English and other languages. Montero's first book was a collection of short stories, Twenty-Three and a Turtle. Her second book, a novel titled The Braid of the Beautiful Moon, was a finalist for the Herralde awards, one of Europe's most prestigious literary awards. Each of her subsequent books...The Last Night I Spent With You, The Red of His Shadow, In the Palm of Darkness, and The Messenger...has been published in the United States in translations by Edith Grossman, as well as in several European countries. The slim novel or novella, The Last Night I Spent With You is perhaps the most sexually explicit. Her other nonfiction work appears frequently in scholarly and literary publications throughout the world. Her most recent novel Son de Almendra is the product of an extensive research about the murder of the mafia leader Albert Anastasia at the Park Sheraton Hotel in New York in the year 1957.
On January 26, 2006, Mayra Montero joined other internationally renowned figures and Latin American authors such as Nobel-laureate Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Benedetti, Ernesto Sábato, Thiago de Mello, Eduardo Galeano, Pablo Armando Fernández, Carlos Monsiváis, Jorge Enrique Adoum, Luis Rafael Sánchez, Ana Lydia Vega and world famous singer/composer Pablo Milanés in demanding sovereignty for Puerto Rico and adding their name and signature to the Latin American and Caribbean Congress's Proclamation for the Independence of Puerto Rico. This approved a resolution favoring the island-nation's right to assert its independence as ratified unanimously by political parties hailing from twenty-two Latin American countries in November 2006.
