Segovia 2018

The practical applications of Artificial Intelligence can undoubtedly improve our lives. But the disruption it causes as it advances might equally make it worse. Can AI misuse the data it handles? Can it write a poem that moves us? Undoubtedly, this is the great technological challenge currently facing society, and Nuria Oliver, Telecommunications Engineer at the UPM and PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), co-founder and director of the ELLIS Alicante Unit Foundation, known as the Institute of Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence, will talk about it at this event. She will be joined by Sonia Mulero, director of the Banco Sabadell Foundation, and Miquel Molina, deputy director of La Vanguardia, with over 30 years of experience, his books include L’everest a l'hora punta, about his experience climbing the legendary mountain, and several novels.

The event will be presented by Sheila Cremaschi, director of Hay Festival Segovia.

Nuria Oliver will participate in the event by videoconference.

Event in Spanish

After many successful careers, strivers, as Arthur Brooks like to call them, question how to find greater happiness as they age and change. His last book From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness and Deep Purpose in the second half of life, instant #1 New York Times Bestseller, touch on this crucial point for our careers as we look for aging with impact. Brooks reinvented himself several times in his career, from musician, to academic, to being the 11th President of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), to author of more than 10 books, and now back to academia, as Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School professor and weekly columnist with How to build a life at The Atlantic. He will give us an overview of his thinking followed by a conversation moderated by Geoffroy Gérard, Director General at IE Foundation, and Lisa Bevill, Academic Director of IE Center for Health, Well-Being and Happiness.

The event will be introduced by Santiago Iñiguez, Vice President of Hay Festival Segovia, President of IE University and author of several books including Philosophy Inc. Applying Wisdom to Everyday Management.

Signatures after the event

Event in English

Free access for studentes

The author writes a lot but very little of it matters. This is the belief of Violeta Gil, who, when she settles down in front of a blank page to write, be it theatre, poetry or novels, likes to invoke ghosts which rise from realities that have not happened. That, she says, is what literature is all about. She has just been awarded the XX Premio de la Crítica de Castilla y León (Castilla y Leon’s Critics’ Prize, 2023) for her novel Llego con tres heridas, in which she ties together two ends of the same thread: love and death, both flawlessly woven into the story of her father, who tragically died when she was three months old.

She will talk to José Félix Valdivieso, born in Brussels to a Spanish mother and an Ecuadorian father. Poet, author of Grito de amor. Hacia una teoría general de las cavidades and La geografia del erizo, Valdivieso says he would like to learn all the world’s languages, so as to have more synonyms to fall back on. For now, he has mastered Classical Greek, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, and several others, along with the language of the street; graffiti.

Event in Spanish

The authors will sign their books after the event.

The Intramuros magazine has been developing the canon of ‘minimal autobiography’ for more than 25 years. Beltrán Gambier, its director, and the French Hispanist Jean-Pierre Castellani meet up again to give a workshop with the aim of revealing the secrets of the genre for those who wish to tell their life in a thousand words (minimal autobiography) or more (autobiography). This will be done through reading selected extracts of ‘autobiographies’ to encourage and motivate the participants to write four or five first-person paragraphs in the same workshop, which will be read among the participants in the second of the sessions. No academic training in the art of biography is required to take part in these two workshops.

Varge is a cross-border village in the district of Bragança, in the Porto and Norte region, to the north of Portugal. Here, tradition and nature merge in a lasting embrace of a past that still resonates in the present. For this reason, participants in this event —now in its second edition —will share a day which is all about celebrating the importance of our villages and valuing their quest for survival. Activities will include a traditional mask-making workshop, and a gastronomic tasting session of local Transmontane food, and in particular bread baked in a communal wood-fired oven still in use today after hundreds of years. There will also be a tour of the Grande Rota dos Molinos e dos Lameiros (the Mills and Lameiros Way), which was inaugurated last year between Spain and Portugal.

The event will have the participation of the writer José Ramón Alonso de la Torre, an expert in the Raya, of which he has written three books: La frontera que nunca existió (2006), R&R, Restaurantes de la Raya (2009), and Un viaje por la Raya (2021).

The ticket does not include transportation to Varge

They say the best camera in the world is the one in your hand. In this practical one-and-a-half hour workshop for 20 people, given by Lisbeth Salas, students, using nothing more than their own smartphone, will learn how to turn their casual snapshots into personal images worthy of framing. Above and beyond technical knowledge, it is about learning to look, to understand what is in front of us, before taking the photo. This includes, for example, understanding light, because as Salas herself says, "we are light tamers". Her work focuses on portraits, documentary photography and photography of literary subjects. She has published the photobooks Infinitamente serio (on the writer Enrique Vila-Matas) and Rostros y decires (on the poet Rafael Cadenas, winner of the 2022 Cervantes Prize) with La Cámara Escrita publishers. She is a contributor to the Cultura/s supplement of La Vanguardia. She has photographed Javier Marías, Paul Auster, Javier Cercas, Umberto Eco, Fernando Trueba, Isabel Coixet, Francis Ford Coppola, and many others.

Event in Spanish

A journalist and writer, but above all a novelist, Reyes Monforte is one of the most famous authors on the Spanish literary scene. Her first book, Un burka por amor (2007) became a bestseller, with 52 editions, and her television series was watched by more than four million viewers. After that novel she has continued to write others, such as Amor cruel (2008), La rosa escondida (2009), La infiel (2011), Besos de arena (2013), La memoria de la lavanda (2018) and Postales del este (2020), all of them marked by success. In 2022 she published La violinista roja, which told the story of the Spanish woman who was the most important Soviet spy of the 20th century.

The author will talk with writers and journalists Elsa González and Carlos Aganzo in the extraordinary setting of the Sabero Valley, in the mountains of León.

The author will sign books at the end of the event.

Event in Spanish

The National Photojournalism Award, created and delivered by ANIGP-TV, has collected the most important events that have taken place in Spain and the world over the last decade. Susana Vera, Maysun, Ricardo Garcia Vilanova, Pedro Armestre, Mar Sáez, Samuel Aranda, Domingo J. Casas, Álvaro Barrientos, Olmo Calvo and Santi Palacios are some of the more than 70 photographers participating in this exhibition, where we can appreciate from the riots in Egypt and Tunisia, the migratory flows caused by the war in Syria, the tragedies of the Strait, the evictions of houses in the face of the economic crises, the visit of the Pope to Spain, climate change, regional festivals, armed conflicts, 15M and a long etcetera.

Eduardo Méndez, president of ANIGP-TV, and Antonio Graell, curator of the exhibition, intervene in the presentation of the exhibition.

Event in Spanish

The National Photojournalism Award, created and delivered by ANIGP-TV, has collected the most important events that have taken place in Spain and the world over the last decade.

Susana Vera, Maysun, Ricardo Garcia Vilanova, Pedro Armestre, Mar Sáez, Samuel Aranda, Domingo J. Casas, Álvaro Barrientos, Olmo Calvo and Santi Palacios are some of the more than 70 photographers participating in this exhibition, where we can appreciate from the riots in Egypt and Tunisia, the migratory flows caused by the war in Syria, the tragedies of the Strait, the evictions of houses in the face of the economic crises, the visit of the Pope to Spain, climate change, regional festivals, armed conflicts, 15M and a long etcetera.

Eduardo Méndez will speak at this event about the National Photojournalism Award and its photographers. He began his professional career in 1983 working for the magazines Antena Semanal and Antena TV. He makes the leap with the founding team to Suplemento Semanal and Suplemento TV -currently XL Semanal-.In 1989 he joined the team of photographers at Época magazine, where he remained until 2009, the year in which he joined La Gaceta de los Negocios newspaper as chief photography editor. During these years he has been a special envoy in conflicts such as the war in Yugoslavia, the war in Iraq or Kosovo, also participating in numerous reports, interviews and journalistic investigations. He is the author of the book Digital Photography, Little Secrets of a Professional.

Event in Spanish

All-terrain journalist is a good way of summing up Javier Pérez de Albéniz. He has been a music critic for El País, where he also wrote sports reports and features in the Sunday supplement. At the newspaper El Mundo, he was part of the team that created La Revista, and he spent a decade there, writing current affairs and travel reports. His blog, El Descodificador, dedicated to television and all that this medium has done in favour of the intellectual deterioration of human beings, has run for over 20 years. This work of social critique won the prestigious Congreso de Periodismo Digital de Huesca Prize in 2009.

Thanks to his enormous capacity to make the most of his time, Pérez de Albéniz has, through these years of intense work, managed to travel without haste, read without pause, listen to music at a deafening volume and, you knew this was coming, write a bunch of books. These include the first Springsteen biography in Spanish, (1986), followed by Lugares poco recomendables and Diez mil kilómetros a través de África, El lince ibérico and La guerra del lobo.

In 2015, he hit a bump in the road; being diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. So, at the age of 56, he set off on a different journey in search of ways to control the disease and continue to enjoy life. A game awaited him at the crossroads, to which he sold his soul and to which he dedicates the book, Los Reveses (una historia personal sobre parkinson y ping-pong); a declaration of love for the sport that serves as therapy and at which, in three short years, he managed to become runner-up in the world championship. He won gold in mixed doubles at the 2023 Scottish International Open.

Hay Festival offers Pérez de Albéniz an international, intergenerational challenge. First he will be in conversation with Vicente Jiménez, director of As. Then, he has agreed to face off at the ping-pong table with the UK ambassador to Spain, Hugh Elliott; with local table tennis coach Paco Gilarranz, and Adrián Jerónimo Pérez, a local young player. Beltrán Gambier will be the substitute player of the challenger.

The author will sign his books at the end of the event.

Event in Spanish

In our increasingly polarised society, the debate on the effects of generative AI on culture was bound to be argued in extreme terms, and so it is. The debate ranges from panic at the unbounded usurpation of content to enthusiasm for the development of a technology that expands the boundaries of art. Months after the irruption of the game-changing language processing tools, such as ChatGPT, it is time to address the issue by laying out contrasting opinions, but, more importantly, through the sharing of real experiences in the fields of music, art, literature and the management of cultural festivals themselves. The writer Lorenzo Silva, Ricard Robles, founder and co-director of the Sónar festival; Daniel Fernández, editor of Edhasa, columnist for La Vanguardia and president of the Royal Board of Trustees of the National Library of Spain; and Sheila Cremaschi, international cultural manager and director of Hay Festival España, will speak on the subject. The debate will be moderated by Miquel Molina, deputy director of La Vanguardia, essayist and novelist.

Event in Spanish

For the second year running, Hay Festival Segovia will visit Segovia Prison to deliver the workshop Minimal Autobiographies, led by Beltrán Gambier, founder and director of the magazine Intramuros, a leading publication in this genre. Over the magazine’s 27 years, it has been contributed to by prestigious writers, including Nobel Literature Prize winners such as Günter Grass, Herta Müller and Mo Yan. This is an opportunity for inmates to take part in an intellectual literary activity, supported by the Hay Festival, in which they can write an extract of their own autobiographies. Gambier is also a lawyer and author of several legal texts in areas including Penitentiary Administrative Law.

Gambier will give the workshop with Félix Losada, Intramuros writer and trustee, as well as with El País journalist Noelia Núñez.

Event in Spanish

In these changing times, it has become imperative to reflect on human creativity in a world in which artificial intelligences are also beginning to create. Hay Festival hosts a debate on the role that the humanities should play in the age of artificial intelligence and the intergenerational impact that it entails. In an conversation, moderated by journalist and author Marta Garcia-Aller, Nuria Oliver, a renowned scientist who co-founded and directs the ELLIS Alicante Foundation, an institute dedicated to exploring the impact of AI on humanity and John Maeda, a prominent American computer designer and engineer, known for his groundbreaking work at the intersection of technology, art, and the humanities who also holds the role of Vice President of Design and Artificial Intelligence at Microsoft, will delve into the imperative of AI, its impact on the humanities and its derivatives.

This conversation will be joined by two young people who are currently developing their studies in the field of technology: Teresa Lufuluabo, an orchestra conductor converted into a programmer thanks to Escuela 42 and its disruptive programming campus promoted in Spain by Fundación Telefónica, and Juan Heslop, a recent graduate in Data Science from IE University, winner of poetry and essay prizes from the IE Foundation, singer and digital analyst in a consulting firm.

Event with simultaneous translation from English to Spanish and vice versa.

How do you write a news story? How do you choose a good photo? What is a headline? In the El País journalism workshop, children will have the chance to learn about the art of journalism through activities that require no more than the desire to tell a story. In this hands-on session, the students of El Peñascal Primary School will choose their own story, learn how to write it up as a news item and put together a front page to take home as a souvenir. The workshop will be given by El País journalist Noelia Núñez.

How can virtual reality enhance a cultural experience? The Immersive Learning department and the Division of Arts and Humanities at IE University have curated a series of experiences for the participants of this year's Hay Festival Segovia, in which you can experience virtual reality and its applications to education. Is there such a thing as an original text? Goretti González will guide us to an answer in her immersive masterclass for 30 people.

In this event, participants will be invited to explore literary texts through the lens of virtual reality. Professor Goretti González, PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard University and a specialist in Humanities and Languages will challenge us with her question: Is there such a thing as an original text?

Throughout the day from 11am to 7pm, except during masterclass times, festival-goers will be able to explore the metaverse and visit the IE Virtual Gallery on Spatial.io. They can also take in the exhibition of the winning photographs from the 2022 IE Foundation Prize in Humanities.

Free Admission every 30 minutes. Up to 30 participants at a time (Except from 12:00 to 12:50)

Masterclass: 9 euros

Event in English

Reading books, which only a few years ago seemed to be stagnating or even in decline, is undergoing changes that bring some optimism to the horizon. This comes along with some interesting trends in habits, like an increase in the number of audiobook users. This round table addresses the opportunities of the audiobook from the perspective of publishers and platforms. Ángela Álvarez, director of Penguin Random House Audio; Juan Baixeras, country manager Spain & Italy, Audible; Álvaro Curiel, country manager Storytel, Mariana Féged, general manager Spanish Markets, France & EMEA, Bookwire; Rafael Luna, director of marketing and business and digital at Editorial Anagrama and Raúl Pérez, head of Digital eBook and Audiobook Grupo Planeta will explore this topic together.

Event in Spanish

Is there a more masculine archetype than the world-renowned spy and notorious womanizer James Bond? What adventures can courageous women lead in the perilous eighteenth century world of smugglers? These questions of gender, genre and heroism sit at the heart of Kim Sherwood’s novels Double or Nothing, the first in a new series expanding the world of 007, and A Wild & True Relation, a literary historical feminist smuggling tale. Sherwood’s award-winning writing explores stereotypes related to gender and the role of women and women’s writing throughout history.

Kim is an author and creative writing lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, where she lives in the city. Her first novel, Testament (2018), won the Bath Novel Award and Harper’s Bazaar Big Book Award. It was longlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize and shortlisted for the Author’s Club Best First Novel Pick. In 2019, she was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Her second book, Double or Nothing (2022), is the first in a trilogy commissioned by the Ian Fleming Estate to expand the world of James Bond.

Kim Sherwood will discuss how her work confronts stereotypes and challenges gender norms in a conversation with Cristina Ward, Head of Arts at British Council Spain.

At the end of the event, the author will sign copies of her books at the booth located at the main entrance of IE University.

Event in English.

Picasso is, without a doubt, the most celebrated, admired and representative artist of the 20th century, and yet his moral behaviour was questionable to say the least. In our moralistic 21st century world, hypersensitive to political correctness, and vigilant to themes of mistreatment and oppressive behaviours, José María Beneyto's Las Traiciones de Picasso —a non-fiction novel— raises the problem of the intrinsic value of the work of art; the relationship between creation and the life of its creator, and how far it is legitimate for an artist to justify his behaviour through his work. Beneyto is Professor of International Public Law and International Relations, a lawyer and a writer. He has been spokesperson for the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Spanish Congress of Deputies, and vice-president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

The event will be presented by Ana Nuria Fernández.

At the end of the event, the author will sign copies of his books at the library.

Event in Spanish

Popular action of the NGO AIDA to generate a community experience of meeting tradition and modernity through art and crafts, for the dissemination of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

30 horsepeople and 100 voluntary pedestrians will walk through the streets of the historic centre of the city, carrying 90 banners made ad-hoc, made by Marta Troya, a visual artist from Segovia, Angel Peris, a graphic artist, and Panamá Diaz, a photography artist, with images refering to the key words of the 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, combined with images of cooperation projects and people who benefit from these AIDA projects and other NGOs, along with original pieces from the three creators.

Accompanied by the music of the traditional Segovian dulzainas, the procession will go through the streets of Segovia from the Aqueduct to the Plaza Mayor, at noon, in the style of the traditional ceremonies for the celebration of great deeds, with a choreographed finale in the square itself, in which the participating volunteers will place the banners in such a way that they form a triple artistic installation, in the open air, which will remain until nightfall, to be later exhibited in the Cathedral's retrochoir.

Despite the prejudices society might hold about young people and their reading habits, children and teenagers are actually among those who read the most in Spain; a higher percentage, in fact, than people older than them. So, if young people are among those of us who read the most, why do we think that they don't? How do young people read? What genres do they prefer? How do they consume literature? How do social networks and new technologies influence reading? How does reading influence their values, interests, and choices? Gemma Lienas, a writer with a long career in literature for children and young people, and winner of the Ramón Llull (2003) and San Joan (2018) prizes, will explore these and other questions, along with Redry (David Galán), poet and winner of the Espasa poetry prize (2019), and Marta Álvarez, youth editor at Anaya.

The event will be moderated by Carme Riera, writer and academic, winner of the National Prize for Spanish Literature (2015).

At the end of the event, the authors will sign copies of their books at the book stall on Calle Real.

Event in Spanish