Hay Festival Cartagena 2023

Carmen Alvarado works in the world of culture, libraries and books. She has also written books featuring characters such as Tío Tigre (Uncle Tiger) and Tío Conejo (Uncle Rabbit) that come from oral tradition, and using them has tacked issues we find in daily life, such as friendship, love and death.

At this event, the Italian writer Giovanna Giordano will present a novel recently published in Spanish: Un vuelo mágico. Inspired by the true story of her grandfather, this is a beautiful fable with hints of fantasy about it, in which Giulio Giamò, a young Italian pilot, is sent to Abyssinia to give to King Haile Selassie a declaration of war signed by Mussolini. During the journey, Giamò will encounter a challenging new view of the world. This enchanting and dreamlike story is an expression of the writer’s view that “if a man picks up a book, he puts down a gun”. In conversation with Juan Esteban Constaín.

Simultaneous interpreting from Italian to Spanish available

In 2019, Bernardine Evaristo (United Kingdom) made history for being the first black woman to win the prestigious Booker Prize, with her novel Girl, Woman, Other. Her most recent work of fiction, Blonde Roots, a satirical novel that reimagines history as we know it: the great powers of Africa are in charge of the transatlantic slave trade, and those enslaved are white. With prowerful prose and a sharp sense of humour, Evaristo leads us to question the bases of society as we know it with this bold alternative tale of our past. At this event, she will talk to Aurora Vergara about her work and her life.

Simultaneous interpreting from English to Spanish available

A look at the work of our favourite writers through the more intimate format of the book club, together with Ana María Aponte. Olga Montero Rose (Peru) is the author of Cortejo, a novel that tells the story of Simona, a woman in her mid-40s who has just lost her mother, one of the pillars of her life, and who, around this time, meets a woman who makes her question many of the certainties she once held. The story evolves through the sessions Simona attends weekly with her analyst, which involve examining her experiences of childhood, bereavement, desire and the birth of a new love.

The transmission of violence and trauma between generations is the foundation for the latest novel by the French writer Jean-Baptiste del Amo. Le fils de l’homme is the story of a man who comes back to his partner and his son after a long absence and who takes them to live in a remote mountain home, as his father once did with him. But the mother and son soon feel claustrophobic under the control of a father tormented by his own relationship with his parent. Speaking to Juan Mauel Ruiz, the author will talk about how this novel came about, and about some of his themes, such as the transmission of violence within a family and man’s domination of nature.

Simultaneous interpreting from French to Spanish available

Two Colombian thinkers, Catalina Cortés Severino y Laura Quintana Porras, one an anthropologist, the other a philosopher, and both writers, reflect on the emotions in their recent and original book Esos afectos voraces: Una correspondencia, in which they use the epistolary form to exchange thoughts, drawing on the knowledge of their own disciplines in order to examine human experiences. A look at the emotions and how they structure and define experience (from the personal to the collective) and our own culture. In conversation with the BBC Mundo journalist, Andrea Díaz Cardona.