Josefina Licitra wins the Sor Juana Prize for her novel Crac.

Licitra and Crac: the book that won the Sor Juana

Argentine journalist and writer Josefina Licitra took the 2026 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize for her novel Crac, as Clarín and Página/12 reported on Monday, November 2. It is awarded by the Guadalajara book fair, in Mexico, and each year honors a woman author of a novel originally written in Spanish.

Crac, published by Seix Barral, is a work of nonfiction that reconstructs the estrangement between the author and her father, a political militant of the 1970s who went into exile in Europe in 1978. Licitra told Clarín that the book was born of two related conflicts: her father's silence and a block of her own that led her to stop writing.

According to Página/12, the starting point was August 2023, when the author broke a foot in a dance class and learned that her father, who had not spoken to her for eight years, would travel to Argentina. Earlier, in 2019, she had published a chronicle about that relationship in the Brazilian magazine Piauí.

What the Sor Juana Prize jury valued

The decision was unanimous among the five members of the jury, which reviewed 135 titles by women authors from twelve countries, according to Clarín. The panel included Chilean Giselle Etcheverry Walker, Venezuelan Daniel Centeno Maldonado and three specialists from Mexico.

In its ruling, the jury described Crac as a confessional novel that turns a private experience into literature and uses it to think about memory and grief, and also about writing and authorship, according to Página/12. It also valued the way the author shifts between registers and perspectives with humor and, in its words, without falling into sentimentality.

The jury also granted an honorable mention to Giovanna Rivero, a writer from Bolivia, for Alma oscura del alba, a novel it described as a fable shot through with politics.

Who Josefina Licitra is

Licitra was born in La Plata in 1975 and combines journalism and literature. Her books include El agua mala, which tells what happened at Epecuén with the houses under water; 38 estrellas, about a women's prison break; Los otros, a tour of Greater Buenos Aires; and Los imprudentes, about gay and lesbian adolescence in Argentina.

She has published in the Chilean daily El Mercurio, in the Brazilian magazine Piauí and in The New York Times en español. Today she edits Orsai, a narrative magazine, and in 2004 she won the best-text award given by the Fundación para un Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano, which is linked to Gabriel García Márquez.

The Sor Juana and Argentine women authors

According to Página/12, Licitra is the tenth Argentine to receive the prize. Her predecessors include Tununa Mercado, Claudia Piñeiro, María Gainza and Camila Sosa Villada. According to Clarín, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara had already won in one of the two previous editions.

On December 2, at 6 pm, Licitra will receive the award at the Auditorio Juan Rulfo, as part of the 40th edition of the Mexican fair. The prize amounts to 15,000 dollars. The next day, the fair will bring together winners from earlier editions, among them Gioconda Belli, Margo Glantz and Claudia Piñeiro, to read from their works and talk about the future of literature, according to Clarín.

To understand the context

The Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is the prize the Guadalajara fair gives to a novel written by a woman and originally published in Spanish. This year 135 works by authors from twelve countries were submitted and the ruling was unanimous.

For readers in Buenos Aires, Crac is the book of an author from La Plata who had already written about Greater Buenos Aires and about Epecuén. The publisher is Seix Barral, the prize is worth 15,000 dollars and the ceremony will take place in Mexico on December 2.