Hay Festival Segovia 2022

Leonor Pataki is the winner of the 38th Young Creators’ Prize at the 2025 Loewe Foundation International Poetry Prize for her work Una madeja de estambre. An ode to the cat, a loyal and independent animal that embodies many of the habits she herself desires to be happy. More than an animal, a symbol, as the award jury put it. Throughout her collection, she seeks the beauty of the ‘slow life’, of facing challenges through reflection. Pataki will be in conversation with Susana Pliego Quijano, Director of Culture at the Casa de México Foundation in Spain.

After the event, the author will sign copies of her books

Event in Spanish

A new instalment of ‘Propios y ajenos’, a series of public readings now in its 17th edition as part of the Hay Festival Segovia. The Torreón de Lozoya is one of the most iconic buildings dating from the 13th to the 15th centuries. A place to lose oneself in, where Jessica Andrews, Hwang Bo–Reum, Ana María Caballero, Guillermo de' Medici, Beltrán Gambier, Norberto García Hernanz, Luis Lorente Benito, Gustavo Martín Garzo, Sonia Martín Giménez, Mónica González, Roel Nieuwenkamp, Nacho Orovio, Leonor Pataki, and Ainhoa Sánchez will read their own works or those of their favourite poets.

José Félix Valdivieso, poet and self-confessed lover of languages and language, will be joining the readings as master of ceremonies.

In case of rain, the event will be moved to auditorio of Torreón de Lozoya at the same time

Event with readings in Spanish, Dutch and English

What can poetry do for us? Can it change our relationship with words, with pain, with beauty, with nature, with love and with life? Thomas Schlesser, art historian and author of the publishing phenomenon Mona’s Eyes, and of the philosophical novel The Gardener’s Cat, discusses poetry as one of the oldest and most powerful ways of putting the world into words. Schlesser will discuss all of this with Elena Garrigues, a passionate expert in art and culture who works as a professor of Ethics at lE University. 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 sign copies of his books

Event in French with simultaneous interpretation into Spanish

The cave, where one can hear The Dark Night; the orchards and the chapel, where The Spiritual Canticle resounds; and there, high above, with Segovia as a backdrop, the tree of St. John of the Cross, Living Flame of Love… A journey of literary and spiritual fulfillment through the places of the most poetic of all saints and the holiest of all poets, on the centenary of his designation as a Doctor of the Church, led by the minstrels of the San Juan de la Cruz Academy of Fontiveros: Luis Alberto de Cuenca, Raquel Lanseros, José María Muñoz Quirós, and Carlos Aganzo.

Event in Spanish