Hay Festival Colombia Digital

Ernest Hemingway was one of the first writers to live in and write about a country at war, using his experiences as a reporter during the civil war in Spain as the background to For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). How has the role of writers and journalists changed during the current war and what choices did Ukrainian writers make after Russia initiated it in 2014 by annexing Crimea? American writer and photographer Michael Katakis manages Ernest Hemingway's literary estate. Victoria Amelina is a novelist and activist, a winner of the Joseph Conrad Literary Award. Jon Lee Anderson is an American biographer, war correspondent and staff writer for The New Yorker. Janine di Giovanni is the co-Founder and Director of The Reckoning Project: Ukraine Testifies, a USAID-supported organization that documents and verifies war crimes and builds cases for international justice mechanisms. Chaired by Tetyana Oharkova, a Ukrainian literary scholar, journalist and essayist.

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The Tanzanian-British author, winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, in conversation with the Ukrainian writer and decolonisation specialist.

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Silvana Paternostro, la periodista barranquillera quien vivió en Panama del 1977 a 1989 empezó su carrera en La Prensa, conversará sobre su libro Soledad y Compañía, una mirada muy especial a través de sus amigos a la vida de Gabriel García Márquez. Cuando Silvana Patenostro asistió a un taller sobre periodismo dictado por Gabriel García Márquez le oyó decir al escritor que su activismo político consistía en hacerle mandados a sus amigos entre ellos estaba el General Omar Torrijos. En su historia oral, Paternostro recoge algunas de las voces que narran el activismo político de Gabo.

María Dueñas (Spain) is a widely-read author who has achieved considerable prominence worldwide. A Doctor in English Philology, she worked as a lecturer at the University of Murcia and at various institutions in the United States before turning to writing full time. Dueñas published her debut in 2009, the acclaimed novel The Time In Between (released in English in 2011); the book became a publishing phenomenon and has been translated into over 35 languages and made into a successful television series. Some of her best received books are The Heart Has Its Reasons, La templanza, Las hijas del capitán and Sira, all featuring an exploration of history, culture and identity, with strong, resilient female characters. Her narrative talents and capacity to connect with readers have won her awards such as the Cartagena City Historical Novel Prize, and the Madrid Region Culture Prize.

Carlos Vives is a living legend. Named Person of the Year in 2024 by the Latin Recording Academy, Vives is one of the most prolific recording artists and most loved musicians in the Spanish-speaking world. He has been in music for over three decades, winning two Grammys and 18 Latin Grammys. He has worked with artists of all kinds, from Rubén Blades to Shakira, and he has become an ambassador of Colombian culture to the world. He will talk to Andrés Mompotes about his extensive musical career.

Four experts on the classical world will talk to Toni Celia about the lessons we can take from that period, so far off in time, but so influential for Western culture, and whose echoes can still be heard in our legal systems, the philosophical tradition, and in the sciences and arts. Charlotte Higgins (United Kingdom), Chief Culture Writer at The Guardian, is the author of Greek Myths. A New Retelling, about the influence of ancient Greece on our times; Pablo Montoya (Colombia) is the author of Marco Aurelio y los límites del imperio which portrays the last of the five “good emperors” of Rome; and with John Sellars (United Kingdom), philosopher and the author of books such as Lessons in Stoicism, Epicurus and the Art of Happiness and now Aristotle: Understanding the World’s Greatest Philosopher.

John Sellars will participate in this event digitally

Simultaneous interpretation from English to Spanish available

Nikole Hannah-Jones (United States) is a journalist who specialises in racial justice, and who received the Pulitzer Prize for the 1619 Project, a collaborative effort that has also published a book and made a documentary film exploring the history of slavery in the United States. She will speak to Colombian academic Aurora Vergara about the 1619 Project and the new movements for historical reparation which are arising all over the Americas, working to recover the silenced histories of racialized groups who have been left out of official history.

Simultaneous interpretation from English to Spanish

Colm Tóibín (Ireland) is a novelist, journalist and educator, and is one of the most influential writers in contemporary literature. Throughout his career, he has received numerous awards, including the E. M. Forster Award in 1995 and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for The Master (2004). His most recent work, Long Island (2024), the highly-awaited sequel to Brooklyn (2009), explores the life of Eilis Lacey two decades after her move to Long Island, dealing with the impact of the past on the present. He will talk to Charlotte Higgins.

Simultaneous interpretation from English to Spanish available

The writer and journalist Leila Guerriero (Argentina) presents her book La llamada, a profile of the Argentine Silvia Labayru, a member of the armed group Montoneros and who in 1976 was kidnapped, tortured and raped at the Escuela de Mecánica la Armada clandestine detention centre, where thousands of people were held and murdered during the dictatorship. Labayru survived the experience, and was interviewed by Guerriero, beginning in 2021, while waiting for the outcome of the first trial for crimes of sexual violence committed against women who disappeared during the dictatorship, at which Labayru was a plaintiff. In conversation with Ana Cristina Restrepo.

Nicola Lagioia (Italy) won the Strega Award in 2014 for The City of the Living, translated into 15 languages. He contributes to all the major Italian cultural media, including La Stampa, La Reppublica, Il Venerdì and Internazionale, and is one of the presenters of Pagina3, a daily programme on Radio3. Author of The City of the Living, in which Lagioia explores guilt, responsibility and that fragile border that, we believe, keeps us safe from playing the role of executioners; he discovers echoes of his own youth and a human dimension of evil that is not easy to glimpse. In his latest book, Ferocity, he breaks down and defines our merciless contemporary world and weaves a plot that explores the ferocity latent in each individual, trapping the reader in a labyrinth of secrets and lies.. In conversation with Camila Osorio.

Simultaneous interpretation from Italian to Spanish available

The journalist and writer Juan Gómez-Jurado (Spain) is one of the finest thriller writers in his language, and a bestselling author whose work has been translated into over forty languages. His Red Queen trilogy has been made into a Prime series, and is one of the most popular Spanish-language series of all time. Todo muere, the last part of his trilogy Todo arde from the narrative universe of the acclaimed Reina Roja series, and a long-awaited ending to one of the most read and loved contemporary sagas in the Spanish language. In conversation with Juan Lozano.