Herralde Prize for the sharp and irreverent literature of Margarita García Robayo

BarcelonaThe Colombian writer Margarita García Robayo (Cartagena de Indias, 1980) was awarded this Thursday the 44th Herralde Prize for Querida Sharik, an epistolary novel about a woman looking for her origins. For the jury, which granted the award unanimously, this "splendid" book proves that the writer "is at the best moment of her career". Editor Silvia Sesé defined the work as "a read that estranges and fascinates" and highlighted "its ironic, cruel tone, but one that ends up committing to the characters". The award, granted by the Anagrama publishing house, comes with 25,000 euros and the publication of the novel, which will arrive in bookstores next Thursday.

The starting point of Querida Sharik is the protagonist's desire to trace her ancestors. Through about twenty letters addressed to a supposed ancestor of Angolan origin, the woman embarks on an epistolary but also geographical journey, as she will travel alone to a Caribbean island where she will encounter "erotic fantasies and spectacular sunsets" but also a landscape that is degrading due to climate change and tourism. "I wanted to make a kind of portrait of this human vice of inventing our memory. We have the need to build fictions to support our present. We must invent a genealogy, an origin, so that it may be a balm and a comfort," highlights the writer. To develop this, she uses a literary game in which the letters that make up the novel are unidirectional, leaving the responses of this ghostly ancestor up in the air.

Brief but not contained

The novel traverses themes such as gender, race, love, desire, forms of sexual violence, climate change, the plastic lie of tourism, the impossible return to a natural and human ancestry, and artificial intelligence as part of the dialogue in fiction. "These are not opportunistic elements but rather sifted through the tone and literary construction. It is a brief but uncontained work that sparks numerous folds of reflection," highlights literary critic Gonzalo Pontón Gijón, who was part of the jury. Regarding the presence of artificial intelligence in the book, the author joked that it is an element that is part of the plot, but that "you can put the book through any application and you will see that a machine did not write it," in reference to the latest controversies related to other literary awards.

One of the unique elements of the book, according to the jury, is precisely the irony the author uses to narrate the story. "The pages stand out for their savage humor, their audacity, their sharpness, the extreme love towards the characters, and the formal originality essential for narrating that which had not yet been narrated, and which causes pain," points out the writer Marta Sanz, who is also part of the jury. Querida Sharik arrives after other relevant titles by García Robayo such as La encomienda (Anagrama, 2022) and Primera persona (Anagrama, 2026). Dedicated for four decades to recognizing the best Hispanic American literature, the Herralde Award has previously recognized writers such as Enrique Vila-Matas, Cristina Morales, Mariana Enríquez, Javier Pérez Andújar, Luis López Carrasco and Cynthia Rimsky and Xita Rubert.