SEM Literary Agency
Martín Doria
argentina - colombia
(Barranquilla, Colombia, 1973) An aviation physician by profession and a writer by vocation, he has resided in Buenos Aires since 1990. His published work centers on the internal conflict in Colombia—a war whose most intense years he experienced as a child and adolescent. His novel *Los niños de mangle* won the 2019 Getafe Negro International Crime Novel Award; it was published by EDAF (Spain) and distributed in Spain, Mexico, and Colombia in 2019. His novel *La extranjera* won the Manuel Zapata Olivella National Novel Award (Colombia, 2010) and was published in that country the same year. His novel *Melisa entre las hojas* received a special mention in the Children’s and Young Adult Literature category at the 60th Casa de las Américas Prize (Cuba) and was published in 2019 (by Niña Pez). His novel *Un caimán dorado* was a finalist for the 2018 Medellín Negro International Novel Contest and the 2021 Ciudad de Bogotá Novel Award; it was published by Ediciones Diotima in 2024. His novel *Postales de Río* won second prize in the national "Osvaldo Soriano Award 2007" and received a special jury mention at the 2012 Azabache International Crime Novel Festival (Mar del Plata, Argentina); it was published by EDUVIM. Two years later, a graphic novel adaptation was released by the same publisher. In 2025, it was reissued by the publishing house La Escena del Crimen. He has also published short stories in various anthologies across Argentina and Colombia.
BIO
WORK
Los niños de mangle (The mangrove children)
*Los niños de mangle* launches the saga of Efraín Sánchez—known as "El Caimán"—in the tradition of urban detective fiction. The setting is the Colombian Caribbean, stretching from the desert peninsula that juts into the Caribbean Sea to the major tourism corridor encompassing the colonial cities of Santa Marta and Cartagena, with its base of operations in the modern, cosmopolitan city of Barranquilla. The death of a prostitute and the disappearance of her daughter, young Carol, plunge Efraín—a former military police officer, baseball enthusiast, and admirer of Caribbean women—into the world of child sex tourism networks within the impoverished, amphibious communities of the Magdalena Marshlands (*Ciénaga del Magdalena*). The plot unfolds during the freewheeling Carnival season, with the peace treaty negotiations with the FARC serving as a dramatic backdrop.
Andrés is a man of both literal and literary weapons. He serves as the right-hand man to a fellow countryman—a mobster hiding out amidst the placid opulence of Nordelta. Unexpectedly, he has also become a rising star in the Buenos Aires literary scene, following the success of his novel *La argentina*. The book chronicles the life of his mother—a young woman from Buenos Aires who, in the 1970s, joined a Colombian guerrilla group—a complex, shadowy tale he had only pieced together in fragments through other people’s accounts. When he receives an unforeseen call to take charge of his father’s remains—soon to be exhumed from a cemetery in Mariguá, a tiny hamlet in the Colombian tropics—he sees a chance to find more answers. He sets out to return to the place he fled as a teenager during a fratricidal war, arriving in a country that, after six decades, is still debating the terms of a final armistice. Yet, his own past and that of his family remain a searing, white-hot reality, further inflamed by the brutal massacres currently targeting social leaders in the post-conflict era. Dark family secrets—both old and new—begin to lift the veil that his own memory had cast over his mother’s disappearance and his father’s descent into madness; these are the very stories he had mistakenly recounted in his unexpectedly successful novel, which is now being adapted for the screen.
Un caimán dorado (A golden caiman)
