Hay Festival Segovia 2023

Intramuros magazine has been working on the «minimal autobiography» canon for more than 25 years. Beltrán Gambier, its director, with the collaboration of Guilas Moreira, actor and audiovisual producer, will give a workshop with the aim of showing the secrets so that the public can tell by writing, if they want, their life in a thousand words: minimal autobiography. And this is done through theoretical guidelines and the reading of selected fragments of autobiographies to encourage and motivate the participants—who do not require any academic training—, in the same workshop, to write four or five first paragraphs in the first person, or a minimum complete autobiography, that will be read among the participants in the second of the sessions of this autobiography workshop.

Event in Spanish

The worst thing that can happen to a writer is to have a creative crisis and not know what is causing it. Could it be love? A hidden mystery? Perhaps even the geography of the place you are in is influencing and conditioning it. Journalist and writer Nativel Preciado will discuss this off the back of her recently published novel Palabras para Olivia (Words for Olivia), which is set in large part in the lands of León. She will do so in conversation with Ana Gavín, director of Editorial Relations at Grupo Planeta, and with Aurelio Loureiro, a writer from León who was director of Leer magazine.

Born in Madrid, Preciado has had a long career as a journalist since the times of the Spanish transition to democracy. She has received awards such as the Francisco Cerecedo, the Víctor de la Serna, the Pluma de Plata, the Premio de Honor de la Asociación de la Prensa and the Manuel Alcántara Prize for International Journalism. In addition to numerous essays, she has also written works of fiction such as El egoísta (1999 Planeta Prize finalist), Camino de hierro (Primavera Novel Prize 2007), Canta solo para mí (Fernando Lara Novel Prize 2014), and El santuario de los elefantes (Azorín Prize 2022).

There will be a book signing at the end of the event

Event in Spanish

For the third consecutive year, Hay Festival Segovia holds the Minimal Autobiographies workshop at the Segovia Prison, led by Beltrán Gambier, founder and director of the magazine Intramuros, a leading publication in the genre. Over the magazine’s three decades, it has had contributions from prestigious writers, including Nobel Literature Prize winners such as Günter Grass, Herta Müller, and Mo Yan. Gambier is also a lawyer and writer of several legal texts in areas including penitentiary administrative law. Pedro Zuazua will also participate. He is a graduate in Hispanic Literature and Linguistics from the University of Oviedo, Director of Communications at PRISA Noticias, and author of En mi casa no entra un gato and Días para ser gato, books with autobiographical content about his life with his cats Mia and Atún.

This is a unique opportunity for people who are incarcerated to participate in an intellectual literary activity where they will write a fragment of their own autobiography.

Event in Spanish

The José Manuel Lara Foundation firmly believes that the promotion of reading leads to social transformation, especially among young people. To this end, the students of the IES Francisco Giner de los Ríos Secondary School in Segovia will meet with a writer they have chosen themselves; the poet David Galán Redry, teacher from Valladolid, online poet, and winner of the ESPASAesPOESÍA 2019 award.

The aim is to encourage reading among the students and at the same time explore the idea that books can be used for more than as a source of escape or leisure, that more and better reading can lead them to improve their grades and open doors to a brighter future. The José Manuel Lara Foundation pursues social transformation through reading as it is evident that a young person who reads will gain more knowledge, be more skilled in critical thinking, will have greater possibilities for the future and, therefore, will be happier.

Event in Spanish

Selected as one of the best young British novelists by Granta magazine in 2023, Eley Williams's short fiction appears in anthologies including The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story, Pilot Press's Modern Queer Poets and Liberating the Canon, edited by Isabel Waidner. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, her debut collection Attrib. and other stories won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and her novel The Liar's Dictionary; in which she unpacks how rigorous and also absurd language can be, won a 2021 Betty Trask Award and was named one of The Guardian books of the year.

Williams will discuss her work, her influences and her view of contemporary literature with Cristina Ward, British Council in Spain’s Head of Arts.

There will be a book signing at the end of the event in the room next to the main entrance

Event in English

François-Henri Désérable returned from a long trip to Iran after the harsh repression of the uprisings of 2022 with a sense of powerlessness over his experience and the need to tell the story. Arrested by the Revolutionary Guards, he was forced to leave the country. Yet the plan had been so much more peaceful: to follow in the footsteps of travel writer Nicolas Bouvier in Iran. He was already on the outbound plane when it all went wrong with a phone call urging him to turn around as his life could be in danger. From this bitter experience was born the book L’Usure d’un monde: une traversée de l’Iran. ('The Wear and Tear of a World. A Journey through Iran'). Born in 1987, Désérable featured on the prestigious Blanche de Gallimard 2013 list of authors, with Tu montreras ma tête au peuple, a novel set in the French Revolution. With Évariste he won prizes such as the Geneviève Moll Biography and Histoire de Paris. He established himself as one of the best writers of his generation by winning the Grand Prix de l'Académie Française 2021 with Mon maître et mon vainqueur.

Désérable will talk to Eva Orúe, journalist, writer, cultural manager, and director of the Madrid Book Fair. The event will be introduced by Isabelle Berneron, attaché for books, ideas and media networks at the Institut Français D'Espagne.

There will be a book signing at the end of the event in the lecture room next to the entrance

With simultaneous translation from French to Spanish

The advent of artificial intelligence raises many questions for the writing industry and, in particular, for writers, translators and journalists. CEDRO’s director general, Jorge Corrales, along with journalist Juan Soto Ivars, will have a conversation led by the writer, deputy director of the RAE and president of CEDRO, Carme Riera, to discuss generative artificial intelligence and its impact on the publishing sector. They will explore the effects of using and training these tools on authors' rights, and the concept of authorship in the face of the new challenges that these technologies present.

Soto Ivars is a writer and columnist for El Confidencial and El Periódico de Cataluña. He appears on radio and television programmes such as Julia en la Onda and Espejo Público, and also presents a special feature on censored and condemned books for the programme Cuarto Milenio. His latest publications include the essays La trinchera de letras (which won the Premio Internacional de Ensayo Jovellanos prize) and Nadie se va a reír: la increíble historia de un juicio a la ironía (Premio Fam Cultura Pop Eye prize-winner)

There will be a book signing at the end of the event.

Event in Spanish

In the 80s, the group Mecano, with Ana Torroja at the microphone, formed the centre of a web of thousands of anonymous voices which sang their songs anywhere, at any time and in any place. The relationship between music and words is as true as it is ambiguous at times, as is the relationship between historical and personal time.

Blanca Baltés and Emilio Peral Vega reflect on this, and how it manifests itself in literary and musical forms of expression. Baltés is a playwright, theater researcher and entrepreneur in the audio world; she holds a PhD in Spanish Linguistics and is the author of Mamá no lo sabe todavía, a novel that tells the interconnected stories of several Spanish women during the second half of the 20th century. Peral Vega is professor of Spanish Literature, Vice-Dean of Culture, Institutional Relations and Library at Madrid Complutense University. Together with Elena Torres Clemente, he has published Mecano. Inspiración poética y genio musical.

There will be a book signing by both authors at the end of the conversation

Event in Spanish

Creators like writers, journalists, poets, storytellers, and filmmakers use different registers to transmit a narrative and images to others. What are their techniques, their voices, what mental and psychological training do those artists need, especially when they are undertaking more than one of these disciplines at the same time? Are there creative masks to put on and take off? Mariana Torres and Hugo Martín will read their own texts and talk about their creative process, their obsessions and their quests.

Torres, Brazilian writer and filmmaker, living in Spain, is a founding member of Escuela de Escritores. In 2015 she published the book of stories The Secret Body. She directed the short film Rascacielos, which won awards at various film festivals. In 2017 she was included in the Bogotá 39 list, a selection of the best young writers in Latin America by Hay Festival. Martín Isabel is a young poet from Segovia who has published Monstruo maúlla (First Prize in Poetry of the XXXIII Young Art Contest of the Junta de Castilla y León, 2021/22) and La sensibilidad enferma (XIX National Youth Poetry Prize Grande-Aguirre , 2023).

The event will be moderated by Laura Ventura, literature professor at Madrid’s Carlos III University and journalist for the Argentinian newspaper La Nación.

Event in Spanish

Women in literature often star in powerful stories that always seem to have a fissure of a wound running through them. And that wound is portrayed not as an impediment, but as their incentive to move on in life and, especially, in love. These many truncated stories, which rise together in transcendence over hurt, is what Elvira Sastre and Eva Orúe will talk about.

Sastre, born in Segovia, has published the collections of poems Cuarenta y tres maneras de soltarse el pelo, Baluarte, Ya nadie baila and La soledad de un cuerpo acostumbrado a la herida. She works with musicians, singer-songwriters and other poets. Her novel Días sin ti won the Biblioteca Breve Prize (2019), and she has released Las vulnerabilidades, in which she combines drama with psychological suspense. The writer fills theatres and concert halls with her poetry recitals, and shares her poetry, experiences and her personal world with readers online.

Orúe is a journalist, writer and cultural manager, and currently directs the Madrid Book Fair.

There will be a book signing at the end of the event at the bandstand in the Plaza Mayor

Event in Spanish

William Graves, son and literary executor of Robert Graves, comes to the Hay Festival Segovia to talk about his father's literary legacy. An important part of this legacy were his letters from Mallorca, an intense correspondence which Graves maintained with writers, artists, muses and celebrities of the time. This immense archive is kept at the Robert Graves Foundation in Deià, the town to which Graves moved after leaving the United Kingdom with a resounding Good-Bye to All That. William will read excerpts from the letters, and other narrative and poetic texts by his father. And what better way to celebrate the recent publication of Goodbye to All That, in an unabridged edition with a new translation.

The voices of other writers and artists present in Segovia will accompany the reading, including Caroline Michel, Giles Tremlett, Ana Bosch, Andrew Brown, Pilar Álvare, Almudena Bermejo and Debbi Christophers, who will read paragraphs from his other works including I, Claudius, and The White Goddess. The readers will be joined by Félix Valdivieso as master of ceremonies.

In case of rain, the event will be moved to the IE University Sala Capitular

With readings in Spanish and English

Tamara Duda is a Ukrainian writer, journalist and translator born in Kyiv, and author of two novels. Her literary debut, Daughter, won her the prestigious BBC Book of the Year Award 2019.

With the outbreak of war in the Donbas, she abandoned everything to serve as a volunteer at the front. In 2014 and 2015, she and her husband raised funds and bought and delivered equipment and aid to Ukrainian soldiers. The author spent two years in combat areas and refers to the period as the most tragic, fascinating, intense and inspiring time of her life. The novel chronicles this experience, unfolding in Donetsk during the spring and summer of 2014. The events and stories in the novel are not fictional, but based on the author's experiences and the people she met while volunteering with the Ukrainian Army.

Duda will talk about her experiences in life and as a writer with Juan Carlos Galindo, a journalist for El País, author of the novel Hontoria, and contributor to Onda Cero’s literary talk show.

There will be a book signing at the end of the event in the room next to the entrance of IE University

With simultaneous translation from English to Spanish

Human beings are conditioned by multiple factors that shape their lives. In the past, women were born into a masculine world, put at a disadvantage from the start simply by being women. However, reality and literature are full of stories of people who defied the role that others had chosen for them, or rather for her. Sonsoles Ónega explores this in Las hijas de la criada, the latest Premio Planeta prize-winner that has garnered a legion of followers.

Ónega is a journalist, writer and host of the leading afternoon television program Y ahora Sonsoles. Author of other novels such as Calle Habana, esquina Obispo , Donde Dios no estuvo and Después del amor, she will talk about her work and the characters within it with Ana Gavín, director of Editorial Relations at Grupo Planeta.

There will be a book signing at the end of the event in the room next to the entrance of IE University

Event in Spanish

Can you write about a misfortune and at the same time read it as restorative? People have many faces, and pain and also redemption are imprinted on them. A multipresence to which is added the gaze that others place on us and that also shapes us. This is what the Dutch writer Jente Posthuma explores in her writing. She will talk to Irene Hernández Velasco about her work and how her personal experiences influence it.

Posthuma debuted with Mensen zonder uitstraling in 2016, a critical and sales success, which was nominated for the Dioraphte Literatour awards, the Hebban Debuut Award and the ANV Debutanten. Her second novel, What I'd Rather Not Think About, has placed her as a finalist for the International Booker Prize 2024. Hernández Velasco is the head of the Culture section of El Confidencial.

At the end of the event, the author will sign copies of her book in a room next to the IE University entrance

Event with simultaneous translation from English to Spanish

We only get one life and certain characters will stop at nothing to achieve their dreams, however unreachable they may be, and even if they come at a staggering cost. The writer determined to explore an unscrupulous character must bear in mind that to avoid cliché, everything has to fit, even when the puzzle has an infinite number of pieces. In his new novel, El mejor del mundo, Juan Tallón tackles the story of a soft-hearted egocentric who essentially understands nothing of the world around him; an outcast despite having it all.

Tallón is a journalist and writer, he has worked as a journalist in media such as El Progreso, Jot Down and El País, among others. He is the author of several books in Galician and in Spanish. He has published non-fiction works such as Libros peligrosos and Mientras haya bares as well as the novels El váter de Onetti, Fin de poema, Salvaje oeste, Rewind, and Obra Maestra. The writer will talk to Nacho Orovio, lead journalist of A Fondo, La Vanguardia newspaper’s investigative journalism team.

There will be a book signing at the end of the event in a room located at the entrance of IE University

Event in Spanish

Many of the women who have made their mark in centuries past did so in spite of the conventions of the time and thanks to intelligence, ambition and passion combined in equal measure into a force that sometimes destroyed them. Writer Reyes Monforte tells one such story in depth in La condesa maldita, the real-life Countess Maria Tarnowska, descendant of the Scottish queen Mary Stuart, member of one of the most important Russian aristocratic families of the court of the tsars and closely connected to the Romanovs. Overnight, she became the first femme fatale of the belle époque and the focus of the 20th century’s first true crime story. She was accused of instigating the murder of her soon-to-be husband, with the help of two of her lovers: Moscow's most famous lawyer, and the Russian translator of Charles Baudelaire’s work. It was the scandal that shocked the whole of Europe at the beginning of the 20th century.

Monforte will discuss the novel with Carlos Aganzo, author of some twenty books of poetry and as many travel books. Formerly editor of Diario de Ávila and El Norte de Castilla, he is currently director of the Vocento Foundation.

There will be a book signing at the end of the event

Event in Spanish