Margarita García Robayo wins the 44th Premio Herralde with novel Querida Sharik

The winning novel

Margarita García Robayo, born in Cartagena de Indias in 1980, has won the 44th Premio Herralde de Novela with Querida Sharik, a book that carries a prize of 25,000 euros and is organised by the publisher Anagrama. The result was announced on Thursday, 5 November 2026, in Barcelona. The manuscript was submitted under the pseudonym Orika Biohó. The novel is written as a correspondence. Its narrator, a woman from the Colombian Caribbean who lives in another country, takes a genetic ancestry test that links her earliest ancestor to a woman born in Angola around 80,000 years ago. The only route by which Angolan DNA could have reached the Colombian Caribbean, the narrator concludes, was the slave trade.

Letters that reach more than one recipient

The narrator plans a holiday on a Caribbean island with her daughters, but her former husband alters the plans and she travels alone. On the island she begins writing to her ancestor, yet the letters also reach other women in her life: her grandmother, mother, aunt, sister, cousins and the woman who looked after the family's girls. Coverage describes the book as about twenty letters written only by the narrator, set on a tourism-driven island. Robayo has described that island as a territory that is destroying itself. She said the novel is about what is inherited, and about the need to leave and show oneself to the world in order to be accepted.

The jury's verdict

The jury consisted of Fernando Pelayo, Gonzalo Pontón Gijón, Marta Sanz, Juan Pablo Villalobos and the editor Silvia Sesé. Pelayo, who runs the +Bernat bookshop in Barcelona, praised the book in terms of the present day.

“While everything around us crumbles, Margarita García Robayo invites us to draw conclusions about the present by writing to the women of the past.”

Speaking to journalists in Barcelona after the verdict, the winner described the novel's theme in direct terms.

“It is a novel about shame, which is what gets inherited, far more than skin tone.”

Robayo added that she wanted to portray the human habit of building fictions to sustain ourselves in the present. Pontón Gijón described the book as a work that blends the enslavement and race, the consumer and tourism pressures and the environmental decline of the present into one epistolary structure.

Submissions and the prize

The 44th edition received 2,223 manuscripts, according to La Razón and El Periódico. El Periódico noted that this figure nearly triples the 892 manuscripts submitted the year before. El Mundo reported that the entries came from 43 countries. The previous winner was the Argentine writer Pablo Maurette, who received the prize last year for El contrabando ejemplar.

2025892

20262,223

2025

892 manuscripts

2026

2223 manuscripts

Data from the article text

Publication and the author's path

El Mundo reports that Querida Sharik will be published on 11 November. Anagrama reissued Primera persona this year in an expanded edition, a collection of eleven autobiographical stories first published in 2017. García Robayo left Colombia in 2004 and settled in Buenos Aires in 2005, after living in Bogotá, Mexico and Barcelona. Her earlier novels include Hasta que pase un huracán, Lo que no aprendí and Educación sexual, which are collected in El sonido de las olas, and she is also known for the story collection Cosas peores.