Hay Festival Arequipa 2023 – Poetry

For the Spanish writer Luis García Montero, one of the most interesting poets on the literary scene today, poetry has become a way of channelling his feelings and dealing with the pain of loss in Un año y tres meses, a poetry book whose theme is the passing away of his wife, the Spanish writer Almudena Grandes. The result is a luminous book and a moving lesson in mourning. Luis García Montero has also been the Director of the Instituto Cervantes since 2018. He will talk about poetry and about this book in particular with the Peruvian poet Alonso Ruiz Rosas.

Based on the publication of Contrapunto, an album of photos that explores the relationship between text and image, this event looks at how poetic discourse can leave behind its habitual language to make an image with words, and how images activate the need to talk about them in words. We read the images and look at the poems. Víctor Vich, a Doctor in Hispano-American Literature from Georgetown University and the author of several books on poetry, art and cultural policy, will talk about this proposal, which has combined the archive of a photographer -Lucero Del Castillo- with the author’s knowledge as a lecturer in poetry. This event will demonstrate the uniqueness of a book that is innovative in its form and the way in which it offers a sequence (always open to the reader) that involves an examination of the conditions in which we inhabit the world. In conversation with Nereida Apaza Mamani.