All prizes Colombia
Colombia · Since 2015 · For books in Spanish
Awarded in Medellín by EAFIT University and its partners to the best narrative book in Spanish of the previous year by a Colombian author or a foreigner living in Colombia for more than five years: novels, story collections, literary essays and literary journalism. The year shown is the year it was awarded, one after the prize's own label for 2015–2020.
EAFIT University created the prize in 2014 with Grupo Familia and Caracol Televisión, to honour the best Colombian narrative book published in a given year. Publishers, writers, universities and libraries submit books in their first edition; readers narrow them down to a list of finalists, three or four in its first six editions, and a jury of five or six, each year with a writer from abroad such as Enrique Krauze, Juan Villoro, Leonardo Padura, Javier Cercas or Marta Sanz, picks the winner at a ceremony at EAFIT. The winner sits on the next year's jury. It was given every January from 2015 to 2020, the first time to Juan Esteban Constaín. The pandemic and its aftermath then halted it for five years; it returned in 2026 with new sponsors, ten finalists for books of 2025 and a prize of 55 million pesos.
Narrativa Colombiana 2026 · Finalist
Title translated by AI:“The Current”
Novel · 136 pages
AI-generated summary:In a town in eastern Antioquia, chance brings Iván together with Mr. Muñíz, a seasoned motorcycle traveller and born storyteller, who offers to tell him a story.
Narrativa Colombiana 2026 · Finalist
Title translated by AI:“Let the Worst Happen”
Antonio García Ángel · 53 when first published
Novel
AI-generated summary:Nelson Camargo, a failed writer of about fifty who lives on tinned tuna in Bogotá, has just been thrown out of the backstreet college where he teaches when a meeting with a friend turns his life around.
Narrativa Colombiana 2026 · Finalist
Altasangre
Claudia Amador · 27 when first published
Novel · 192 pages · Family, Speculative
AI-generated summary:On Colombia's Caribbean coast, the matriarch of a family of blood-hungry women prepares her granddaughter, born with fangs, to be crowned the next queen of the carnival.
Narrativa Colombiana 2026 · Finalist
Title translated by AI:“Night, Night, Night”
Diana Obando · 38 when first published
Novel · 166 pages · Nature
AI-generated summary:A couple move to an isolated stretch of the high Andean moorland with an old friend, hoping to make a seed from the jungle take root in its harsh, cold climate.
Narrativa Colombiana 2026 · Finalist
Title translated by AI:“Mum's Ghosts”
Gilmer Mesa · 47 when first published
Novel · 292 pages · Family, Politics
AI-generated summary:A heavy-drinking man from Aranjuez, a working-class neighbourhood of Medellín, finds work at the city's General Cemetery and is drawn into ghost stories and buried memories, which he brings home to his mother.
Narrativa Colombiana 2026 · Finalist
Title translated by AI:“The Enchanted Border”
Giuseppe Caputo · 43 when first published
Novel · 320 pages · Family, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:In Barranquilla, a grandmother stands her grandson before a mirror, draws a line down his face and declares one half refined and the other common, and the boy grows up under the spell of her verdict.
Narrativa Colombiana 2026 · Finalist
Title translated by AI:“The Time That Remains”
Nonfiction · 200 pages
AI-generated summary:A philosopher reflects on growing old at a time when the world itself seems to be ending, asking what place older people have in a post-capitalist society and how a body marked by time might be lived without shame.
Narrativa Colombiana 2026 · Finalist
Title translated by AI:“Guide the Slow Ivy, María”
Short stories · Crime
AI-generated summary:The killing of a local healer reputed to be a witch shakes Santa Bárbara, a town worn down by graft and bloodshed, and sets off a chain of linked stories.
Narrativa Colombiana 2026 · Finalist
Title translated by AI:“The Door to Happiness”
Luis Noriega · 53 when first published
Short stories · 200 pages
AI-generated summary:Eleven stories probe the border between faith and fantasy, from little vegan twins who mistrust their meat-eating grandparents to a vending machine for identities that has rebelled against its makers.
Narrativa Colombiana 2026 · Finalist
Title translated by AI:“A Background Noise That Never Goes Silent”
Nonfiction · Family
AI-generated summary:In personal essays written during his daughter's first years, a young father weighs the wonder and confusion of raising a child against the absent and violent fathers who came before him.
Narrativa Colombiana 2020 · Winner
Canciones para el incendio
Juan Gabriel Vásquez · 45 when first published
Short stories · 261 pages
AI-generated summary:Nine stories follow men and women whose lives are changed for good by violence, met head-on or only glancingly, among them a photographer at a country ranch and a Korean War veteran.
Narrativa Colombiana 2020 · Finalist
Title translated by AI:“Where No One Waits for Me”
Piedad Bonnett · 67 when first published
Novel · 203 pages
AI-generated summary:At thirty-one, a man who has turned away from ordinary life and sunk to the bottom, ending up on the street, goes back over his past in writing to understand how he became who he is.
Narrativa Colombiana 2020 · Finalist
William Ospina · 65 when first published
Novel · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:Feeling death draw closer, a writer named William and his friend Mario plan a trip back to the mountain country of his childhood in central Colombia, where his great-grandparents settled on a farm after crossing over from Antioquia.
Narrativa Colombiana 2019 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“How to Lose Everything”
Ricardo Silva Romero · 43 when first published
Novel · 607 pages · Love, Satire
AI-generated summary:In 2016 an elderly Bogotá philosophy professor, new to Facebook, shares an article claiming that mothers are more intelligent, and the storm it sets off starts a relay of stories about couples on the brink.
Narrativa Colombiana 2019 · Finalist
Title translated by AI:“Green Scorched Earth”
Juan Miguel Álvarez · 41 when first published
Nonfiction · War
AI-generated summary:A reporter and a photographer travel to seven Colombian towns scarred by the armed conflict and neglected by the state, collecting stories of war, loss and reconciliation.
Narrativa Colombiana 2019 · Finalist
Title translated by AI:“The Chief”
Novel · 335 pages · Historical, Politics, Crime
AI-generated summary:In Bogotá in the 1940s, as Colombia prepares to declare war on the Axis, the fate of a German-owned brewery pits the ruling class against a bootlegger, a chichería owner and the politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán.
Narrativa Colombiana 2018 · Winner
La perra
Pilar Quintana · 45 when first published
Novel · Family
AI-generated summary:In a small village on Colombia's Pacific coast, a Black woman no longer young, who has spent years trying and failing to have a child with her partner, adopts a puppy.
Also: National Book Award 2020 finalist
Narrativa Colombiana 2018 · Finalist
Title translated by AI:“There Are Days When We Are Gone”
Andrés Mauricio Muñoz · 43 when first published
Short stories · 166 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Six stories turn ordinary home life tense and absurd: a boy vanishes inside his own house, and a couple must keep alive a plant their son's football coach left in his care.
Narrativa Colombiana 2018 · Finalist
Title translated by AI:“Memory Game”
Humberto Ballesteros · 38 when first published
Novel · 193 pages · War, Love
AI-generated summary:A doctor at a care home realizes that her new patient, an old man with Alzheimer's, is the army officer who thirty years ago tortured, and probably killed, the woman she loved.
Narrativa Colombiana 2017 · Winner
Vida
Short stories · 208 pages · Migration, Coming of age, Family
AI-generated summary:Sabina, the American-born daughter of Colombian immigrants, comes of age in New Jersey, searching for somewhere she belongs both inside her close, protective, troubled family and outside it.
Narrativa Colombiana 2017 · Finalist
Title translated by AI:“Official History of Love”
Ricardo Silva Romero · 41 when first published
Novel · 540 pages · Family, Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:A writer tells his family's story backwards, from a night in 1989 when they barely escaped death to the crime, scandal and duel of earlier decades, tracing his parents' and grandparents' lives through Colombia's turbulent history.
Narrativa Colombiana 2017 · Finalist
Volver al oscuro valle
Santiago Gamboa · 51 when first published
Novel · 464 pages · Migration, Crime
AI-generated summary:Several exiles are drawn back toward the places they came from, each needing to settle a score, among them a woman fleeing a wretched childhood and a priest with a paramilitary past.
Narrativa Colombiana 2016 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Korea: Notes from the Tightrope”
Andrés Felipe Solano · 38 when first published
Nonfiction
AI-generated summary:A Colombian writer who has settled with his Korean wife in Itaewon, a crowded district of Seoul, records one year of his work and daily life there, season by season.
Narrativa Colombiana 2016 · Finalist
La forma de las ruinas
Juan Gabriel Vásquez · 42 when first published
Novel · Politics, Historical
AI-generated summary:In 2014 a man is arrested in Bogotá for trying to steal the suit of the murdered politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán from a museum, and a chance meeting draws the narrator, a writer, into his web of conspiracies.
Also: International Booker 2019 shortlist
Narrativa Colombiana 2016 · Finalist
Title translated by AI:“Where Are You Going?”
Tim Keppel · 60 when first published
Short stories · 235 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Fifteen stories move between Philadelphia and Cali, following divorced, lonely and drifting people who look for love on subway trains and in bars.
Narrativa Colombiana 2016 · Finalist
Title translated by AI:“The Year of the Summer That Never Came”
William Ospina · 61 when first published
Novel · 295 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:A writer becomes obsessed with 1816, the year without a summer after a volcano erupted in Indonesia, when Byron's guests at a villa on Lake Geneva gave birth to Frankenstein and the vampire.
Narrativa Colombiana 2015 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“The Man Who Wasn't Thursday”
Juan Esteban Constaín · 35 when first published
Novel · 182 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:Just before he resigns, Pope Benedict XVI reopens a long-shelved cause to make G. K. Chesterton a saint, a case that rests on a secret favour the English writer did for the Church in 1929.
Narrativa Colombiana 2015 · Finalist
Title translated by AI:“What I Didn't Learn”
Margarita García Robayo · 33 when first published
Novel · Coming of age, Family
AI-generated summary:In Colombia in 1991, an eleven-year-old girl who feels shut out by her sisters, her volatile mother and her distant father spends hours riding her bicycle while her family slowly comes apart.
Narrativa Colombiana 2015 · Finalist
Title translated by AI:“The Book of Envy”
Ricardo Silva Romero · 39 when first published
Novel · 525 pages · Historical, Crime
AI-generated summary:Bogotá, 31 August 1896: the poet José Asunción Silva has been dead for three months, and a well-known street eccentric sets out to convince the indifferent city that it was murder, not suicide, and that he saw it.