Maria Mayol i Colom (Sóller 1883 - Cala Major, Palma, 1959) was a writer, politician, activist, and educationalist.

After spending her childhood and part of her early adulthood in France, where she studied at the University of Bordeaux, she returned to Sóller, Mallorca, the town of her birth, where she qualified as a certified public accountant at the Balearic Islands Business School. She published poems and other literary and political pieces in periodical publications like Sóller, L'Almanac de les Lletres, Felanitx, and La Nostra Terra. She also wrote the play Margalideta de Sortdeviu, which was premiered in 1931 at the Teatre Victòria in Sóller to raise funds for new headquarters for the association Promotion of Women's Culture which, founded by Mayol in 1926, was linked with the Mallorcan Association for Culture.

After the proclamation of the Second Republic, she was particularly involved in political activity and, as a result, sidelined her literary career. With her increasingly left-wing progressive Catholic views, she joined the Mallorcan Republican Action party, and subsequently the Balearic Islands Republican Left party, for which she was the only woman standing as a candidate in the 1933 elections. At the time, she was also working as a teacher in Sóller and Felanitx. However, when she was subjected to a reactionary smear campaign because she had run for these elections, she applied for and gained a position in Vilanova i la Geltrú.

With the end of the Spanish Civil War, she went into exile in France where she remained until after the Second World War when she returned to Mallorca, but now retired from public life. In her last years, she tried to compile her scattered written work with the aim of publishing it. Maria Mayol died in Cala Major on 3 December 1959. In
1992, she was named Illustrious Daughter of Sóller.

Web page: Andreu Gabriel i Tomàs for AELC (Association of Catalan Language Writers).
Header image: Reproduction of the portrait of Maria Mayol in the gallery of Illustrious Sons and Daughters of Sóller.
Documentary images ceded by Isabel Graña.
Translation: Julie Wark.