The Colombian writer Margarita García Robayo has won the forty-fourth Herralde Novel Prize, awarded by the publisher Anagrama, for Querida Sharik, according to the ruling announced on Thursday, November 5, 2026, in Barcelona. The award carries a prize of 25 thousand euros and this edition drew 2,223 manuscripts, according to El Universal.

The novel, submitted to the competition under the pseudonym Orika Biohó, grew out of a DNA test the author took to trace her lineage, which led her to an ancestor born in Angola. García Robayo, born in Cartagena de Indias in 1980 and based in Buenos Aires, builds the story around 20 letters that the protagonist addresses to that woman without expecting a reply. For the Mexican reader, the Herralde is one of the signals of which Latin American fiction is circulating in the region, and in this author's case there is a prior relationship with the continent's literary circuit: her story collection Cosas peores won the Casa de las Américas Literary Prize in 2014, according to La Jornada.

The jury was made up of Fernando Pelayo, Gonzalo Pontón Gijón, Marta Sanz, Juan Pablo Villalobos and the Anagrama editor Silvia Sesé, who highlighted the author's "surprising narrative voice," capable of blending an ironic and cruel tone with a commitment to her characters, according to El Universal. Pontón Gijón described it as a novel "very much of its time," one that includes artificial intelligence as one more character, La Jornada reported. In the plot, the protagonist asks artificial intelligence to reconstruct the face of that first ancestor. The author said she was "excited and moved" and explained that she wanted to "make a kind of portrait of that most human of vices: fabulating with our memories."

Querida Sharik reaches bookstores on November 12, according to El Universal. For anyone following Latin American fiction from Mexico, the title adds to a body of work that includes Hasta que pase un huracán, Lo que no aprendí and Educación sexual, and it puts on the table the themes the jury chose to recognize: inheritance, shame and family memory.

This article was written with the assistance of artificial intelligence from verified sources and reviewed by a human editor before publication.