Dear Sharik

WINNER of the Premio Herralde 2026

Dear Sharik is narrated by  a woman from the Colombian Caribbean who now lives in another country. One day, having playfully decided to take a genetic test to trace her ancestry, she discovers that her earliest ancestor was a woman born in Angola some eighty thousand years earlier. She is immediately fascinated by this woman, clear in the knowledge that the slave trade is the only way DNA from Angola could have reached the Colombian Caribbean. 

Determined to connect her own children to their roots, she plans to take them on vacation to a Caribbean island but her ex-husband changes her childcare plans and she ends up travelling alone. Once on  the island,  she begins a correspondence with her ancestor, and the letters gradually also find other recipients: her grandmother, her mother, her aunt, her sister, her cousins, and even the woman who took care of them when they were young, revealing memories in turns hilarious and cruel, as arbitrary as they are accurate.

As this correspondence unfolds, everyday life on the island comes to the fore, as does the time she spends with a man she has just met there. The letters bring to life a family history full of affection, silences, and inheritances that no one remembers having accepted. With a voice that blends irony and intimacy—and that embraces its own contradictions— Margarita García Robayo crafts a novel of extraordinary scope, one that transforms an epistolary conversation into a thinking process and that turns it into a literary realm of enormous originality.