Hay Festival Querétaro 2022 – Journalism

A visual artist and a journalist who, within their respective spheres, have studied and reflected on the experiences of people during the pandemic, will talk to Amanda de la Garza. Lorena Wolffer is a Mexico City-based artist and cultural activist who, in 2020, launched the Diarias Global platform; this initiative, in collaboration with the MUAC, involves the compilation of photos of adults, children and young people in order to portray the way the global Covid-19 pandemic has been lived. The journalist Joseph Zárate (Peru) has been awarded multiple prizes, including the 2018 Gabriel García Márquez Journalism Prize and the 2016 Ortega y Gasset Prize, and is the author of the works of non-fiction Guerras del interior (2018) and Algo nuestro sobre la tierra (2021), which are collections of his reports on funerary work during the pandemic, the outcome of his visits to hospitals, homes, streets, funerary companies, cemeteries and crematoria in Lima during the pandemic.

Juan Miguel Álvarez (Colombia) recently won the 3rd Sergio González Rodríguez Anagrama Non-fiction Prize, organized by the Anagrama Chair at the Autonomous University of Nuevo León. He will talk to the publisher Felipe Restrepo Pombo (Colombia) about La guerra que perdimos, the winning book. Event presented by the Anagrama editor Silvia Sesé (Spain).

In 2018 the whole world was scandalized to find out that a political data analysis agency, working together with Facebook, had played a decisive role in a disinformation campaign that contributed to Brexit and to Donald Trump’s election as US president. Carole Cadwalladr (United Kingdom) is an award-winning journalist who works for The Guardian and The Observer; this Pulitzer Prize finalist played an important role in bringing the story to light. Cadwalladr carried out a brilliant investigation that revealed some alarming facts: that Cambridge Analytica had used the data of at least 87 million Facebook users without their consent. The result? Cambridge Analytica filed for bankruptcy and Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook, had to testify before the US Congress. The work of Carole Cadwalladr is proof that journalism can have great social and political impacts, but it also clarifies how much needs to be done: our democracies are under constant threat. What can we do about it? Cadwalladr will talk about this matter with Emma Graham-Harrison.

Simultaneous translation from English to Spanish available

The multiple award-winning Lydiette Carrión is committed to investigating and documenting violence against women in Mexico. The outstanding book La fosa de agua is a record of her work, dealing with femicides in Ecatepec and Tecámac. Carrión won the 2012 Gender and Justice Prize, awarded by the Mexican Supreme Court, in the Written Report category; and the 2019 Gabo Prize in the Innovation category, for the collective project Mujeres en la Vitrina. In conversation with Iliana Padilla and Anabel Montserrat Pineda Rangel.

Some of the simplest questions are also some of the most profound, taking us into both the history of human development and the very workings of nature. Why does it rain? Where does space begin? It is questions like these that form the starting point for Algo nuevo en los cielos, a book that leads us on a personal and scientific trip into the secrets of the atmosphere, while also covering the ascent of humankind into the skies, expanding our view of the universe. Its author, Antonio Martínez Ron (Spain), is a journalist, scientist and writer. He has worked as a scientific educator for different print, radio and television media outlets, and has received major awards, such as the Ondas Prize and the Concha García Campoy Prize. This event will introduce us to meteorologists, pilots, poets and storm hunters to tell us the story of what Martínez Ron believes to be one of the most fascinating adventures that humans have ever undertaken. He will talk to Camilo Jiménez Santofimio.

At this event, two journalists give us a view of Ecatepec, in Mexico State, which has many of the characteristics, problems and dreams of contemporary Mexican society. Lydiette Carrión, a Mexican journalist and author, writes on the topic of violence against women in her native country. She is the author of the book La fosa de agua, an investigation that documents cases of femicide in the municipalities of Tecámac and Ecatepec in Mexico State. Emiliano Ruiz Parra (Mexico City, 1982) studied Hispanic Language and Literatures and has been a reporter for Reforma and a contributor to Gatopardo magazine. His most recent publication, Golondrinas: Un barrio marginal del tamaño del mundo (Debate, 2022), is his fourth book of literary non-fiction. Since 2020 he has been a member of the Investigative Reporting Unit and works with the Corriente Alterna site, an initiative run by UNAM’s Department of Cultural Dissemination. These two writers will talk to Felipe Rosete about the problems that beset the city of Ecatepec.

For almost a decade, Radio Ambulante has told moving, funny and surprising stories from all over Latin America, revealing the diversity of the region in all its complexity. With over 200 episodes produced in more than 20 countries, Radio Ambulante is Latin America’s most ambitious narrative journalism podcast; it is distributed by NPR, the United States’ public radio service. This will be an opportunity to meet its creators and find out about their work, discovering how they shed light on Latin American life through stories of love and migration, of youth and politics, of the environment and families in extraordinary circumstances. With Daniel Alarcón (Peru), Lisette Arévalo (Ecuador), Pablo Argüelles (Mexico), Camila Segura (Colombia) and David Trujillo (Colombia).

We talk to one of the most eminent journalists and writers of our times, the winner of numerous major awards, including the Maria Moors Cabot Prize (1990), the MacArthur Fellowship (1995), the Ortega y Gasset Journalism Prize (2017) and the Princess of Asturias Prize for Communication and the Humanities (2018). Alma Guillermoprieto studied Dance in New York and gave classes in Havana. Her career as a journalist started in the 1970s, covering Central America for media outlets such as The Guardian and The Washington Post, and later South America for Newsweek. She writes for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. She has held the Julio Cortázar Chair at the University of Guadalajara and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Author of multiple books of articles, essays and reports, her most recent publication is La vida toda: Nueva crónica estadounidense (2022), a compilation of 13 texts, six of them written by women and all of them written in the post-9/11 period in a context marked by the appearance of the social media. Guillermoprieto will talk to the journalist Olivia Zerón.

They write, they report and, above all, they inform about conflicts and events from places that may be very remote or unknown to their readers: Ukraine, Central America, Amazonia... Jacobo García (Spain), El País America journalist and recent winner of the True Story Awards and Emma Graham-Harrison (United Kingdom), a British journalist with vast experience in several countries around the world. They will talk to the journalist Emiliano Ruiz Parra about their fascinating, and sometimes risky, trade.