Hay Festival Colombia Digital

Cities and journeys through the traces left by the past and its memory are settings that Mathias Enard places at the heart of his works as in his latest book, Melancolía de los confines: Norte, in which he blends memoir, travelogue and literary essay. Physical landscapes, but also moral ones, run through his entire body of work, creating a kind of geographical, human and literary border. He explores other borders that have more to do with memory and with the ability to understand who we are when we cease to exist.His latest work, the first part of a quartet on the cardinal points, serves as a vehicle for discussing all this with Helena de Bertodano, a journalist specialising in interviews and profiles of celebrities for prestigious publications. The event will be presented by Zélie Perpignaa, an expert in cultural mediation and attaché for Books, the Exchange of Ideas, and Media Libraries at the Institut Français in Spain.

At the end of the event, the author will be signing copies of his books

Event in Spanish

Julian Barnes (United Kingdom) has suggested that Departure(s), published earlier this year, will be his final book. With this novel about love, happiness and farewells, he brings a long literary career into focus, one that established him as a central figure in contemporary English fiction with works such as Flaubert’s Parrot and The Sense of an Ending. Recently awarded the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature, he is a writer with a distinctly European outlook, whose work moves between fiction and reality, irony and melancholy, and a sustained attention to how stories are constructed, remembered, and revised. One of the most important writers of contemporary fiction will be in conversation with Oleksandr Mykhed.

Mathias Énard (France) has built his work around the circulation of people, languages, and wars across overlapping historical and geographical spaces. In Zone, a single train journey becomes an inventory of modern violence from the Mediterranean to the Middle East, while Compass —winner of the Prix Goncourt— traces centuries of cultural exchange between Europe and the East through music, literature, and travel. His most recent novel, The Deserters, returns to war through two separated timelines, following figures who step away from systems of violence and the structures that sustain them.