Welcome to the Hay Festival Cartagena de Indias 2023 programme, to be held from 26 to 29 January. In this page you can find the events in the general programme as well as Hay Joven activities tor university audiences, Hay Comunitario sessions which will take place in different areas of Cartagena, Reading Clubs and Talento Editorial.
The tickets of the general programme and reading clubs are on sale for in person events. If you wish to register to see the live streaming of events, please select the option "Register to watch online" when this option is available. Hay Joven, Hay Comunitario and Talento Editorial are 100% in person and free of charge.
If you have any issues regarding the payment of your tickets, please contact us at tickets@hayfestival.org or at +57 317 516 55 13.
If you are a students a wish to request free tickets, you can write to us at estudiantes@hayfestival.com.
If you have any general questions, you can find us at contacto@hayfestival.org.
Fernando León de Aranoa, renowned screenplay writer and director from Spain, will talk about his career in general, and in particular about his most recent work, presenting Sintiéndolo mucho, a documentary about the last decade of Joaquín Sabina. León de Aranoa wrote and directed the movie Barrio, telling the story of the life of a group of teenagers in a marginal neighbourhood, and won the Goya awards for Best Original Screenplay and Best Director, and the Concha de Plata for Best Director at the San Sebastián Film Festival. Mondays in the Sun, starring Javier Bardem, which he directed in 2002, won five Goya Awards and the Concha de Oro for Best Film at the San Sebastián Film Festival. In 2021, his movie The Good Boss, starring Javier Bardem, won the Goya Awards for Best Film and Best Director, and was selected by the Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences of Spain as the Spanish representant at the 94th edition of the Oscars, in the category of Best Foreign Language Film. He will talk to the director of El Tiempo, Andrés Mompotes.
The singer and songwriter Ileana Cabra (iLe), who began her career rapping with Calle 13 and won a Grammy with her first solo album, has used musical form to speak out about abuses of power and colonialism; to process the reality that involves her as a woman and a Puerto Rican, as she did during the protests that brought down the island’s government in 2019 and as she does in her latest album, released in 2022, Nacarile. In this special episode of El hilo, recorded live, the artist will talk about her way of working with reality, about the voices of women in the industry, about the power of the stage and of songs to make people heard, to translate something that can touch us all. In conversation with Silvia Viñas and Eliezer Budasoff.
This event will be recorded and later broadcast as a podcast
The figure of the mythical vallenato composer Leandro Díaz (Colombia) has been brought to life in the recent biographical series of the same name produced by RCN. The writer Alonso Sánchez Baute and the screenwriter Rafael Noguera talk to Silvia Hoyos about the task of adapting for television the life and experiences of this personality, so loved by the Colombian public.
The singer, composer, musician and musical legend in the Spanish-speaking world, the Paisa artist Juan Esteban Aristizábal, or Juanes, comes to Cartagena to talk about his book of memoire, Juanes by Diego Londoño, written with the journalist Diego Londoño (Colombia), author of various books about musicians. In conversation with Juan Esteban Lewin Pinzón.
Conversation-homage to the music of the Pacific involving the writer Daniel Samper Pizano (Colombia) and Hugo Candelario González (Colombia), composer, arranger, saxophonist, marimba player and classically-educated conductor, who has dedicated his career to disseminating the music of the Colombian Pacific region. This will be followed by a traditional marimba concert with Trío Bahía, who will explore the possibilities in terms of timbre, melody and rhythm of the marimba, the bombo, the cununos, the guasá and also soprano sax, guitar and vocals.