Hay Festival Medellín 2023

Andrés Felipe Solano (Colombia) is a writer and chronicler, author, among other titles, of the journalistic book Salario mínimo: vivir con nada (Minimum wage: living on nothing), in which he recounts his experience in Medellín as a textile factory worker for six months; and of Corea, apuntes desde la cuerda floja (Korea, notes from the tightrope), winner of the 2016 Biblioteca de Narrativa Colombiana Prize. In this conversation with Isabel Botero, he will be presenting his most recent work, Gloria, a novelistic biography in which the author reimagines his mother's experience as a young immigrant in New York in the 1970s. The author, also an immigrant in South Korea, recounts the daily life of immigration, her interaction with the city and with other immigrants, her world of work, her longing for his native country and, ultimately, her loneliness in the face of the difficulty of building a bond with a foreign society and country.

Leonardo Padura (Cuba) presents the book Personas decentes (Decent People), the latest novel in the saga featuring his well-known character, the detective Mario Conde. The murder of a former Cuban hierarch dedicated to the repression of artists in pursuit of ideological purity, at a time of maximum social and political effervescence in Cuba with the visit of Barack Obama in 2016, is the starting point for this thriller with which Padura portrays one of the most sinister pages in the history of the Cuban revolution. The abysmal differences between the Castro elite and the rest of the population, spiced by political corruption and the use of sex work as a means of livelihood on the island, make up this novel in which many crimes, some physical and others historical and spiritual, are recounted. Róbinson Úsuga Henao will talk to the author, considered to be one of the renovators of the police genre in Spanish.