Hay Festival Medellín 2023

Lina Flórez and Pablo Pérez are the founders of Altais Cómics, a pioneering project in Colombia dedicated to the production, research and dissemination of independent national comics. As creators, both have produced the comics Emilia, Crónicas de una mujer de 1,49 (Chronicles of a woman of 1.49), and Tres horizontes (Three Horizons), the latter being the winner of the Convocatoria de Estímulos para el Arte y la Cultura de la Secretaría de Cultura Ciudadana de Medellín. In Tres horizontes, the authors fuse comic strips with journalism to narrate the lives of three women of different ages and social strata, revealing aspects of their daily lives in Medellín and the way in which they face the challenges they encounter in their professions. In this conversation, the authors will tell us more about the process of creating this work, their work at the helm of Altais Cómics and how they understand the art of comics.

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.