Books, border stories and a reader’s influences

Two individual books and a shared anthology show different sides of Alejandra Omaña’s writing. Her reading interests reach from García Márquez to contemporary fiction.

Relatos de frontera

Published in 2017, Relatos de frontera grew out of the region where Omaña began reporting. Its subject is the Colombian border, including the conflict and inequalities shaping life there. Local experience becomes the starting point for stories with a wider social setting.

Discussing the book, she distinguished fiction from a simple account of her own life, even when experience supplied material. That distinction matters to the way the work is approached: a familiar setting does not make every event a personal confession. The border is both a lived environment and a space for narrative.

Desnuda and writing from experience

Intermedio published Desnuda in 2023. The book turns towards her experience of the adult industry and the relationship between Alejandra and her public persona. It is a personal chronicle of a working world she had previously discussed in interviews, now explored at book length.

Literary events also gave the book a place in conversation. The Universidad de Nariño’s 2024 Temporada de Letras programme scheduled a presentation with Carol Ramírez. Her bibliography additionally includes a contribution to Cuerpos, an anthology bringing together twenty Colombian women writers, alongside her two individual books.

Reading beyond her own books

In a 2019 literary podcast, Hank discussed Cien años de soledad by Gabriel García Márquez, Desgracia by J. M. Coetzee and El hombre de la cámara mágica by Pedro Badrán among books that had mattered to her. The conversation offered a view of her as a reader as well as an author.

Reading also appeared in a quieter account of her everyday interests. In 2018, she described enjoying nature, silence and electronic books, alongside old salsa music and low-budget horror films. These were the preferences she shared at that moment: a personal backdrop to a public career often discussed in much louder terms.