Margarita García Robayo wins the Herralde with the letters of Querida Sharik
Anagrama’s prize, announced in Barcelona on 5 November, honours a novel about family memory and the legacies of slavery.
Margarita García Robayo has won the forty-fourth Premio Herralde de Novela with Querida Sharik. Announced in Barcelona on 5 November, the result awards the Colombian writer Anagrama’s €25,000 prize from a field of 2,223 manuscripts. The novel follows a Caribbean woman living abroad who begins investigating her origins after taking a genetic ancestry test. During a journey, that search becomes a series of letters to an ancestor and the women in her family. The correspondence brings together belonging, shame, power and the memory of slavery. Rather than offering a documentary reconstruction of the past, the author uses fiction to question what families preserve, reshape or prefer not to tell.