Hay Festival Segovia 2023

The author writes a lot but very little of it matters. This is the belief of Violeta Gil, who, when she settles down in front of a blank page to write, be it theatre, poetry or novels, likes to invoke ghosts which rise from realities that have not happened. That, she says, is what literature is all about. She has just been awarded the XX Premio de la Crítica de Castilla y León (Castilla y Leon’s Critics’ Prize, 2023) for her novel Llego con tres heridas, in which she ties together two ends of the same thread: love and death, both flawlessly woven into the story of her father, who tragically died when she was three months old.

She will talk to José Félix Valdivieso, born in Brussels to a Spanish mother and an Ecuadorian father. Poet, author of Grito de amor. Hacia una teoría general de las cavidades and La geografia del erizo, Valdivieso says he would like to learn all the world’s languages, so as to have more synonyms to fall back on. For now, he has mastered Classical Greek, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, and several others, along with the language of the street; graffiti.

Event in Spanish

The authors will sign their books after the event.

The Intramuros magazine has been developing the canon of ‘minimal autobiography’ for more than 25 years. Beltrán Gambier, its director, and the French Hispanist Jean-Pierre Castellani meet up again to give a workshop with the aim of revealing the secrets of the genre for those who wish to tell their life in a thousand words (minimal autobiography) or more (autobiography). This will be done through reading selected extracts of ‘autobiographies’ to encourage and motivate the participants to write four or five first-person paragraphs in the same workshop, which will be read among the participants in the second of the sessions. No academic training in the art of biography is required to take part in these two workshops.