Our former pupil María Margarita Borrero Blanco, graduated 1988, winner of the XI La Cueva National Short Story Prize.

We would like to congratulate our former pupil María Margarita Borrero Blanco, gradiated 1988, who won the XI La Cueva National Short Story Award.

Margarita has a PhD in European Literature from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She studied Social Communications and Journalism at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Bogotá) and has worked as a scriptwriter and a proof reader in Colombia, the United States and Spain. Since 2009, she has been a teacher at the Escuela de Escritores de Madrid. She has given creative writing courses at Mount Saint Mary University (Los Angeles) and the Hugo House Institute (Seattle). She is also the author of the novel El ataúd más hermoso del mundo  (Editorial Renacimiento, 2007), winner of the the short novel Rincón de la Victoria España Prize.

The XIth La Cueva National Short Story Prize is open to all Colombian writers living in the country or abroad, of any age, who have an unpublished short story of between 3,000 and 35,000 words. This year, 1,819 stories were entered, 58% more than last year. 90% of the stories were from Colombia and 10% from other countries, mostly the United States, Spain and Argentina.

This year's first place went to our former pupil María Margarita Borrero, with 'Álbum familiar' (Family Album). The Infobae publications describes Margarita as an author whose subtle and humorous narrative voice has a strength rarely seen in the Colombian storytellers of today (Infobae, 2023).

"With suggestive prose and a great capacity to sustain dramatic tension, [this story] takes [readers] back to the era of analog cameras, when we didn't know exactly what would be recorded when we pressed the shutter," reviews Claudia Lama. "This story reveals to us little by little," she continues, "the image of a middle-class family in urban Colombia in the last decades of the 20th century." (Infobae, 2023)

The La Cueva National Short Story Prize is an initiative of the La Cueva Foundation, created in 2011 by Heriberto Fiorillo, that seeks to strengthen the short story. This literary contest has established itself as an essential event for Colombian writers, regardless of their age or career, as well as for foreigners living in the country.

We wish you many more successes!

Photo taken from infobae.com, January 2023.