Online events

Poetry reading with the participation of six young highly promising authors based in Arequipa and three programme participantes: José Aburto, Jessica Andrews, Esteban Couto, Vanessa Begazo, Moisés Jiménez, Maritza Mejía, Heiner Valdivia and Majo Villegas. Presented by Augusto Carrasco.

In Noche negra, Pilar Quintana (Colombia) returns to the untamed and exuberant Colombian Pacific that she portrayed so convincingly in the acclaimed novel La perra. In her latest book, the protagonist finds herself alone for four days in a setting that is both terrifying and fascinating. She feels threatened not only by nature, but by the people around her. As well as her work as a writer, Quintana has recently edited the second issue of the Biblioteca de Escritoras Colombianas. In conversation with Cristina Fuentes La Roche.

Both the essayist Carlos Granés and the economist Bruce Mac Master have taken on the responsibility of analysing our time and our continent. With El rugido de nuestro tiempo, Granés continues his work of scrutinising the present, and comes to the conclusion, one shared with other commentators, that we live at a time of ideological and geopolitical disorder. In his more recent book, La agenda de la desestabilización. Colombia en la mira, Mac Master takes on one of the most pressing problems of our times: destabilisation, looking at the matter through the Colombian lens. Although these two authors perhaps do not have all the answers, their questions nonetheless open the way to a conscious reflection on the times in which we live. They talk to Tatiana Vásquez

Streamed event

First comes love, then falling out of love, and then after a necessary process, healing; after that one is ready to love again. Después del amor, nosotras is the first book by Virginia Petro De León, a collection of poems illustrated by Eloísa Castro, in which the words live a life worn down by pain, while healing comes on slowly. She will talk about the scars of a heart that has healed with Lu Beccassino, author of the work of non-fiction Si nos enseñaran a amar.

Streamed event

El hijo del hombre, by Juan Esteban Constaín, is a literary and historical essay in which the author examines early Christianity and its profound impact. This writer, whose very personal style is full of anecdotes, will talk to María del Pilar Valencia, about this book on classical antiquity and how Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire.

Streamed event

As well as being three of Latin America’s most renowned writers, Leila Guerriero Argentina), Leonardo Padura (Cuba) and Juan Gabriel Vásquez (Colombia) are all El País columnists. They will talk to Javier Moreno Barber, exdirector of the Spanish newspaper, about how they tackle writing, why it is so important for the reputation of a newspaper to have high profile columnists, and how they contribute to maintaining the narrative, cultural and social bridge between Latin America and Spain.

Fernando Arancón (Spain) is the Editor of El orden mundial, the most read Spanish-language outlet covering international affairs and analysis. Its goal is not just to say what is happening, but why, and it has just published the book Las fuerzas que mueven el mundo, an illustrated work that uses maps, graphs and accessible language to explain 21st-century geopolitics and global economics. He talks to Claudia Gurisatti..

With Morir en la arena Leonardo Padura returns with another masterful description of his native Cuba. He is the chronicler of a lost generation, one that has endured half a century of difficulties, and in his book Havana becomes another character, a witness to the passage of time and wasted promises. Rodolfo, marked by the patricide committed by his brother and reminders of the war in Angola, has recently retired, and intimacy with his sister-in-law, an old love, begins. With his brother, terminally ill, leaving prison and returning home, echoes of the past, long buried, haunt the present. Padura will talk about the book with the writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez (Colombia).

El hijo del hombre, by Juan Esteban Constaín, is a literary and historical essay in which the author examines early Christianity and its profound impact. This writer, whose very personal style is full of anecdotes, will talk to Pablo Arango, Philosophy lecturer at the University of Caldas, about this book on classical antiquity and how Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire.

When writers from the global South take their pens to the topic of the West, it rarely comes out looking good. On this topic, the essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra (India) is one of the most lucid and incisive voices of our times. In Age of Anger he traces the links between contemporary violence and the rise of individualism and capitalism; while in The World After Gaza, he criticises the global racial order imposed by the West. He will talk to Laura Restrepo.

Simultaneous interpretation from English to Spanish available

After listening to Karen Hao (USA), our view of artificial intelligence will never be the same. AI has come to stay, and nobody doubts that it can make certain tasks easier. Even this text could be generated by ChatGPT and few would notice. But nothing ever comes for free. First, because of the huge quantities of energy that this process consumes; and second, because the dark side of AI’s creators and the technological race is being revealed by researchers such as Hao, author of Empire of AI. In it, she examines the companies that act like empires, the exploitation of resources, the underpaid workers from the global South who compile and filter data... In conversation with José Carlos Cueto.

Simultaneous interpretation from English to Spanish available

All events on Saturday, January 31st will be free for people with ID from the department of Bolívar. Complimentary tickets can be requested —up to capacity— at the box office of the Hay Festival (Centro de Convenciones) showing your identification on the same day the event is taking place.

María Corina Machado (Venezuela) won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for “her tireless work supporting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy”. Since becoming a member of parliament in 2010, Machado has become the main figure in opposition to Nicolás Maduro, and she is currently the leader of the Venezuelan democratic movement. She is the founder and national coordinator of VENTE Venezuela, and since mid-2024 she has lived in hiding, from where she coordinated the electoral campaign of Edmundo González Urrutia for the presidential elections of 2024 — after Machado herself won the primaries with a historical majority, but was banned by the government from standing at the elections. Together with Moisés Naím she will talk about many years of resistance, the efforts to unite the opposition, her leadership of the electoral campaign of 2024, and hopes for a better future for Venezuela.

María Corina Machado will participate virtually

The magazine Cuadernos hispanoamericanos promotes knowledge and exchange between writers of different generations and nationalities, united by a single language and a literary tradition enriched by diverse origins. At this special event, Laura Restrepo (Colombia) and Marcos Giralt Torrente (Spain) talk about their work and literary worlds with Pilar Reyes.

The publication of El loco de Dios en el fin del mundo coincided with the death of Pope Francis. Before this, Javier Cercas (Spain) —an atheist, anti-clerical and militant secularist— travelled to Mongolia with him: “a madman without God following God’s fool to the end of the world”. With unprecedented access, he has written a novel without the fiction, a spiritual thriller. This is Cercas at his most personal, one that resonates with successes such as The Impostor and The Anatomy of a Moment.

All events on Saturday, January 31st will be free for people with ID from the department of Bolívar. Complimentary tickets can be requested —up to capacity— at the box office of the Hay Festival (Centro de Convenciones) showing your identification on the same day the event is taking place.

After the peace agreement between Israel and Hamas, a new era has opened up for the people of Gaza: to build a peace amidst the rubble of war and barbarism, all in a context of the most powerful uncertainty. What the future will bring will be the subject of a discussion among Héctor Abad Faciolince, author of Con tres dedos se escribe pero duele todo el cuerpo on the conflict in Gaza, Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This; and Janne Teller, whose most recent novel, Justicia, is set against the backdrop of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. With the moderator José Manuel Acevedo.

Simultaneous interpretation from English to Spanish available

All events on Saturday, January 31st will be free for people with ID from the department of Bolívar. Complimentary tickets can be requested —up to capacity— at the box office of the Hay Festival (Centro de Convenciones) showing your identification on the same day the event is taking place.

How did one of the greatest film directors of his time come to be working for Joseph Goebbels? G. W. Pabst fled the rise of Nazism, taking refuge in Hollywood, where he was a failure. His mother’s illness brought him back to his native Austria, now under the yoke of the Third Reich, where the Nazis attempted to entice him into their propaganda apparatus. After captivating us with novels such as F and Tyll —shortlisted for the Booker Prize—, Daniel Kehlmann (Germany) tells the story of this director, who faced the moral and artistic dilemma of collaborating with the Nazi regime in exchange for saving himself and being able to continue making films. He talks to Philippe Sands.

Simultaneous interpretation from English to Spanish available

All events on Saturday, January 31st will be free for people with ID from the department of Bolívar. Complimentary tickets can be requested —up to capacity— at the box office of the Hay Festival (Centro de Convenciones) showing your identification on the same day the event is taking place.

All that glitters in the world of artificial intelligence is not gold. The friendly side of the tools that in principle make our lives easier have an unknown dark side, as explained by Karen Hao ((USA), Chao Tayiana (Kenya) and Carissa Véliz (UK). It is not a matter of sounding the alarm, more a matter of bringing to light what we do not know about these new technologies: a massive and unprecedented consumption of energy resources, exploited workers in the global South, algorithmic manipulation, loss of privacy when we give over our data, and other problems that we, as users, are rarely aware of. They talk to Luhan Gabel.

Simultaneous interpretation from English to Spanish available

All events on Saturday, January 31st will be free for people with ID from the department of Bolívar. Complimentary tickets can be requested —up to capacity— at the box office of the Hay Festival (Centro de Convenciones) showing your identification on the same day the event is taking place.