Traditionally a country of poets, in recent decades our writers have shifted to the novel and has generated a surge of young Colombian authors that awaken the interest of readers to the far corners of the planet.

As the history of literature, that of Colombia has its origins in the oral tradition: Yurupari Myth, legend and epic Vaupés, first published in Italian in 1890, contains an original history of the river basin and Vaupés told without the influence of the Western canon, which reflected the interests of the natives of the Amazon.

After several centuries of development, the Colombian literature had its highest growth in the twentieth century, rich in poets and poetry movements in Colombia. From post-modern poets Luis Carlos López, humorous and profoundly simple, and Porfirio Barba Jacob, intense, thoughtful and melodic, to the more recent poets of very different styles as Dario Jaramillo Agudelo, Juan Manuel Roca, Mario Rivero.

Include the new ones, among which León de Greiff, the piedracielistas, with Arturo Ramírez Camacho, Eduardo Carranza and Jorge Rojas, the myth group, led by Jorge Gaitán Durán; the nadaístas, led by Gonzalo Arango, the beat generation Dice, whose members account Jattin Raúl Gómez, María Mercedes Carranza and Piedad Bonnet, and the Barranquilla Group, which spent José Félix Fuenmayor, Álvaro Cepeda Samudio and Nobel Garcia Marquez.

In recent years Colombia has been in a boom of writers whose works have been widely welcomed by readers and some of them have been made into films. These authors stand Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Santiago Gamboa, Jorge Franco, Mario Mendoza, Enrique Serrano and Fernando Quiroz. Some are younger, are beginning to publish works that demonstrate not only the interests of the publishing industry in literature but also the excellent Colombian literary scene today.