Colombian writer Margarita García Robayo wins Spain's Herralde Prize for a novel about her African roots
The Cartagena-born writer, who lives in Buenos Aires, won the 44th Herralde Novel Prize from the Spanish publisher Anagrama on Thursday 5 November, worth €25,000, with «Querida Sharik» (Dear Sharik). It was chosen from 2,223 manuscripts from 43 countries, a record for the prize, according to the publisher. The book reaches shops in Spain and Latin America on 12 November; there is no English edition yet.
The manuscript arrived under a pseudonym, Orika Biohó, alongside 2,222 others. On Thursday 5 November in Barcelona, the Herralde Prize jury revealed the author: Margarita García Robayo, born in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, in 1980, and based in Buenos Aires.
«Querida Sharik» (Dear Sharik) wins the 44th edition of Anagrama’s prize, worth €25,000. A total of 2,223 novels from 43 countries were entered, the most in the award’s history, according to the publisher.
Letters to an ancestor from Angola
The novel opens with a family holiday that goes wrong. The narrator, a woman from Colombia’s Caribbean coast, was due to travel to a Caribbean island with her family; her ex-husband changes the plans and she goes alone. There she writes around twenty letters to her most distant ancestor, an African woman she traced through a DNA test linking her maternal line to Angola and to the route of the slave trade, according to Infobae and Actualidad Literatura.
The letters are also addressed to her grandmother, mother, aunt, sister and cousins. The jury said the book deals with «slavery, race, power relations, consumption, tourism and environmental degradation», calling it «a letter about the absurdity of our racial prejudices». Writer Marta Sanz, one of the jurors, praised its «wild humour».
García Robayo said the book is «fiction, but it exists thanks to a true starting point». On what passes down the generations: «shame is inherited».
From Casa de las Américas to the Herralde
The author won the Casa de las Américas Prize in 2014 for her story collection «Cosas peores». With Anagrama she has published «La encomienda», «El afuera» and «Primera persona», and «Holiday Heart», the English translation of «Tiempo muerto», received an English PEN Award.
The jury was bookseller Fernando Pelayo, writers Marta Sanz and Juan Pablo Villalobos, publisher Gonzalo Pontón Gijón and Anagrama’s editor, Silvia Sesé. The other finalists were «Elevación» by Yael Weiss, «En esa tierra extranjera» by Juan Ignacio Chávez, «Institución» by A. Brown and «Un vacío que estalla» by Antonio Godoy.
«Querida Sharik» is published on 12 November in Spain and Latin America.
