Ko. The greatest story ever told, by Care Santos and Adrián Olmedo, with illustrations by Óscar Llorens, has won the 23rd Anaya Prize for Children's and Young Adult Literature 2026. The novel, endowed with 12,000 euros and published on May 7, follows a stone born from a volcano 471 million years ago. Its ironic and curious gaze traverses the evolution of the world.
The Philosopher's Stone of Narrative Development 🪨
Ko's structure rests on a mineral narrator that accumulates geological, historical, and cultural data with database precision. The authors integrate brief chapters that alternate volcanic eruptions with human revolutions, as if programming time jumps on a command line. The result is a story that functions like a compression algorithm: 471 million years in 200 pages. Llorens' illustrations provide almost tectonic diagrams that reinforce the sensation of reading a fossil record.
When Your Witness Is a Rock with a Bad Attitude 😈
Ko has spent 471 million years watching humanity believe it's the center of the universe, when it was already here before continents existed. The stone doesn't hold back: it criticizes wars, applauds mass extinctions, and laughs at our fleeting fashions. In the end, one wonders if it wouldn't be wiser to let stones write history, because at least they don't spoil the next 471 million years.