Hay Festival Querétaro 2023 – Arts & Culture

Maruan Soto Antaki is a writer, born to a Syrian mother and a Mexican father, who is one of the major Mexican analysts of the political and religious situation in the Arab world. He is the author of five novels and several books of non-fiction, including Pensar Medio Oriente, Pensar México and Pensar Occidente. He presents his first work of non-fiction for young people, Lo que hicimos mal los adultos, illustrated by Bernardo Fernández, Bef, with the intention of explaining some of the main conflicts in the world to today’s teenagers, so they have more tools available to them in order to understand the crises that will still be with them in the future. Based on his great understanding of the issues, he will talk with Imanol Martínez about the way he sees the Middle East, the West and Mexico.

We talk about literature, literary production in non-traditional formats, and the intersections of art and writing, on how to narrate artistic experience through words, and also via cultural management projects. With Eva Piquer (Catalonia, Spain), the author of 13 books, former Literary Manager at the Thassalia publishing house and currently the Editor of the cultural magazine Catorze; and María Ptqk (Spain), cultural researcher and art curator with a doctorate in Artistic Research, who specialises in the ecological and the technoscientific, with a post-cultural perspective. In conversation with Cristina Fuentes La Roche, the festival director.

Two of the most outstanding of the republic’s academics present the Diccionario de mexicanismos. Propios y compartidos, the result of the most complete investigation ever carried out into the Spanish spoken in Mexico, an initiative organised by the Mexican Academy of the Language. The text reveals the richness of the language used up and down the country, and it covers popular genres, clothing, culture and other matters. It includes terms from native languages such as Maya and Nahuatl as well as foreign languages such as English or French. In total, the dictionary contains: 10,587 lemmas; 431 sublemmas, which are forms of the lemma which create new meanings; 22,333 headwords and, at the end, a list of voices exclusive to Mexico. With Concepción Company, Assistant Director of the Academy. In conversation with Juan Villoro.