When Felipe Restrepo Pombo read the previous Bogota39 collection of stories by Latin American writers under the age of 40, he was at the start of his career as a journalist in Colombia. He had the opportunity to interview many of the chosen authors and wondered, "Maybe one day I will be on a list like that". Ten years later, he is in the new Hay Festival collection, a fiction writer and an editor of a magazine called Gatopardo in Mexico.
Liliana Colanzi, from Bolivia, has found her short-story niche in horror and the supernatural, and Carlos Fonseca, who is Costa Rican, and whose novel is Colonel Lagrimas, now teaches at Cambridge.
They each commented on the advantage of having a paid job side by side with their solitary writing. Colanzi had worked in the UK as a waitress and has used some of the conversations she overheard in her fiction. Working later as a journalist in Bolivia had enabled her to meet and talk to a wide range of people she might not otherwise have met, including indigenous groups in rural areas. That experience inspired a story about the killing of a witch in the Mexican countryside. Restrepo Pombo said, "Journalism and non-fiction have defined my fiction".
All three write in Spanish, but praised the talented translators who brought their work to an English-speaking global audience.
The anthology is available in the Hay Festival Bookshop now. Tomorrow, Sunday 27 May, a further three featured writers will take the stage in event 111 at 5.30pm.