Hay Festival Querétaro 2023 – Poetry

Divided into five sections, with an opening and an ending in the anime tradition, the poems of Paola Llamas Dinero explore the sensations that occur when fiction forms an essential part of our lives. Through language based on words, images and signs, characteristic of the street, television and Internet, the author examines our relationship with the world of fiction through anime, manga and the social media. She will ask how imaginary worlds determine many of our feelings and identities. She also wonders, if we are constantly relating to characters who do not exist, watching a series or scrolling through stories on Instagram, whether we can really form links with other people. In conversation with Yudi Martínez.

Raúl Zurita (Chile) is one of Latin America's most celebrated poets. He suffered during the repression of the Pinochet dictatorship and in 1979 founded, together with other artists, the Acciones de Arte collective, which undertook grassroots public art actions against the dictatorship, and in 1993, using excavators, wrote the words "NI PENA NI MIEDO" (“NO REGRET NO FEAR”) in the Atacama Desert. Zurita has received Guggenheim and DAAD (Germany) fellowships, and awards including the 2000 Chilean National Literature Prize, the 2016 Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Prize, and the 2020 Reina Sofía Ibero-American Poetry Prize. He will talk to Jan Martínez Ahrens, the Director of El País América, and the event will conclude with a poetry reading.

Najwan Darwish (Palestine) is a poet, journalist and literary critic, described by the New York Review of Books as “one of the foremost Arabic-language poets of his generation” and whose books have been translated into over 20 languages. He is the founder and director of a range of cultural and artistic projects, and he acts as the literary consultant for PalFest (the Palestine Literature Festival). He will talk about his two Spanish-language poetry collections, Exhausto en la cruz and Nada más que perder, with the BBC Mundo journalist, Valentina Oropeza, mixing conversation with poetry readings.

Simultaneous interpretation from English to Spanish available

Two fascinating poets tell us about their recent work, in conversation with the literary critic Guillermo Núñez. With Garry Gottfriedson (Canada), poet, rancher and member of the Secwepemc community, who has just published Tierra y lenguaje, a representative sample of his poetry, published in bilingual format (English/Spanish). Poeta griego arcaico is the most recent book by Luis Felipe Fabre (Mexico), poet, fiction writer and dramatist, who returns to poetry after a number of years away, taking up the mythological story of Medusa and Perseus. This is a masterly retelling of ancient legends, bringing them into dialogue with us and our present, with a poetic language so precise and evocative that the images he sings will reverberate long in the minds of readers. Introduced by Ingrid Bejerman.