Hay Festival Cartagena 2024

Gustavo Rodríguez (Peru), winner of the 2023 Alfaguara Novel Prize, pays homage to his mother and grandparents in Mamita, about family ties that reach back to the Amazon region in the 20th century, and about the cultural and social tensions of that time. This is a “postponed family duty” that has become one of the writer’s most personal and reflective novels.

Los tres mundos. La conquista de las Galias por Julio César is the highly awaited continuation of the series dedicated to Julius Caesar by Santiago Posteguillo (Spain). After the great success of the last two books in the saga, Roma soy yo and Maldita Roma, which told the story of the origins and rise of the great dictator, we now read about the conquest of a territory that is hostile to Roman interests. This historical novel also visits Egypt, and covers the exile of the Pharaoh Ptolemy XII, the father of Cleopatra. Rome, Gaul and Egypt, three worlds in which Posteguillo brings an end to his Julius Caesar cycle.

At this event we celebrate the writer Gonzalo Celorio, Director of the Mexican Academy of Language and winner of the 2025 Cervantes Award with an “exceptional body of literary and intellectual work that has contributed in a profound and sustained manner to enriching the language and Hispanic culture”. He will talk with the journalist Javier Lafuente about Ese montón de espejos rotos, a book of memoir in which he talks about his public and private life, his literary vocation and those who have inspired him.

We talk about what we love most: listening to stories. From the communal spaces for enjoying literature to collective spaces such as reading clubs; as well as archives for recovering shared histories, both physical and digital, and non-hegemonic narratives which act to nourish our languages. We offer space for this discussion with Mónica Acebedo (Colombia), the author of Letras compartidas. Una estrategia de lectura; Javier Ortiz Cassiani (Colombia), historian, university lecturer and a consultant to various institutions; and Chao Tayiana Maina (Kenya), founder and director of African Digital Heritage.

Interpretation from English to Spanish available

Community work and the links built up among communities are spaces of resistance in a context of global capitalism, a way of making the world a more liveable place. This also applies to cultural spaces and the visual arts. Three leaders, from the United States, Colombia, and Brazil, tell us how they work, from the field of cultural management (Dejanira Álvarez and Catalina Villa) and from multimedia art (Frekwéncia).

Consecutive interpretation from Portuguese to Spanish available

After listening to Karen Hao (USA), our view of artificial intelligence will never be the same. AI has come to stay, and nobody doubts that it can make certain tasks easier. Even this text could be generated by ChatGPT and few would notice. But nothing ever comes for free. First, because of the huge quantities of energy that this process consumes; and second, because the dark side of AI’s creators and the technological race is being revealed by researchers such as Hao, author of Empire of AI. In it, she examines the companies that act like empires, the exploitation of resources, the underpaid workers from the global South who compile and filter data... In conversation with José Carlos Cueto.

Simultaneous interpretation from English to Spanish available

All events on Saturday, January 31st will be free for people with ID from the department of Bolívar. Complimentary tickets can be requested —up to capacity— at the box office of the Hay Festival (Centro de Convenciones) showing your identification on the same day the event is taking place.

Carry Somers (UK), a proponent of ethical fashion and founder of Fashion Revolution, has recently published The Nature of Fashion, a fascinating look at how we learned to create clothing from plants. This lecture will reveal some of the most recent research involved in writing the book, as well as some of the stories included in its pages, which take us from the first vegetable fibres to the colonial era and beyond. After the talk, there will be a question and answer session moderated by Ricardo Chica, Deacon of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Education at the University of Cartagena.

Incas, espías y astronautas es un retrato de las preocupaciones, simpatías e intereses recurrentes de Rafael Dumett (Perú). En este libro de ensayos y prosa sin ficción, mira al pasado para transitar por escenarios contrafácticos de la historia; y al mismo tiempo orienta su mirada al futuro, imaginando los obstáculos a los que se enfrentarán los primeros humanos que migren desde la Tierra a nuevos planetas. También traza un mapa de inquietudes tan erudito como personal y revela la carpintería de su oficio narrativo. De todo ello, y del éxito cosechado con novelas como El espía del Inca y El camarada Jorge y el Dragón, conversa con Jorge Sará.

Various members of the La Pambelé band will take part in this musical event, to talk about music and activism. This ensemble is heir to the salsa brava of Willie Colón and Héctor Lavoe, the salsa of the street, a protest salsa, that, instead of singing about love became about the life of the neighbourhood, with all its uprootedness, pride, pain and resistance. La Pambelé mingle conversations about their music and influences with performance, for the listening pleasure of those attending.

María Corina Machado (Venezuela) won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for “her tireless work supporting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy”. Since becoming a member of parliament in 2010, Machado has become the main figure in opposition to Nicolás Maduro, and she is currently the leader of the Venezuelan democratic movement. She is the founder and national coordinator of VENTE Venezuela, and since mid-2024 she has lived in hiding, from where she coordinated the electoral campaign of Edmundo González Urrutia for the presidential elections of 2024 — after Machado herself won the primaries with a historical majority, but was banned by the government from standing at the elections. Together with Moisés Naím she will talk about many years of resistance, the efforts to unite the opposition, her leadership of the electoral campaign of 2024, and hopes for a better future for Venezuela.

María Corina Machado will participate virtually

Although Albania is now becoming a tourist destination, it continues to be the most closed of the former Communist countries in eastern Europe. The Albanian philosopher Lea Ypi tells the story of her childhood in the country in Free, which has won awards including the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize and the Slightly Foxed First Biography Prize. Fronteras de clase is a compilation of three political essays about inequality, migration and citizenship; while her most recent work, Indignity, once again weaves together family and political history, reconstructing the life of her grandfather through secret police archives, in a story about individual and collective dignity in contexts of repression and transition. She talks to Marianne Ponsford.

Simultaneous interpretation from English to Spanish available

The magazine Cuadernos hispanoamericanos promotes knowledge and exchange between writers of different generations and nationalities, united by a single language and a literary tradition enriched by diverse origins. At this special event, Laura Restrepo (Colombia) and Marcos Giralt Torrente (Spain) talk about their work and literary worlds with Pilar Reyes.

Improbable is a documentary podcast —the first original production by BBC Mundo— about the love story between Catalina and Jorge Suárez. She is a right-wing influencer, close to former president Álvaro Uribe; he is a former guerrilla fighter and son of Mono Jojoy, one of the main commanders of the FARC. The story, told through the voices of the protagonists, family members, friends and archive material, captures the complexities of the conflict and the peace agreement in a country that is slowly changing. Both of them, together with Andrea Díaz Cardona, the documentary maker behind Improbable, will talk to José Carlos Cueto, a journalist from BBC Mundo.

This event will be recorded and then broadcast as a podcast.

Marina de Tavira (México) stars in this play in which she plays Antígona González, a character who, just like Sophocles’ Antigone, has lost her younger brother, and seeks him in order to give him a burial. In doing so she faces threats, fears, social prejudices, family division and impotence. The work is a stage adaptation of the book of the same name by Sara Uribe, which reflects the reality of forced disappearances in Mexico. In the words of Tavira, “recently Mexico reached the official figure of a hundred and thirty thousand disappeared. This means that nearly a million people are living through horror, every day; the horror of Antígona González”.

A workshop for singing songs, in order to listen to them. A workshop for “catching butterflies” in a playful and poetic sense, using the emotions. Participants will create their own songs together with the coordinator Jairo Ojeda, using the literary strategy of it looks to me. The workshop will include a conversation about the interaction between listening to and singing songs.

The publication of El loco de Dios en el fin del mundo coincided with the death of Pope Francis. Before this, Javier Cercas (Spain) —an atheist, anti-clerical and militant secularist— travelled to Mongolia with him: “a madman without God following God’s fool to the end of the world”. With unprecedented access, he has written a novel without the fiction, a spiritual thriller. This is Cercas at his most personal, one that resonates with successes such as The Impostor and The Anatomy of a Moment.

All events on Saturday, January 31st will be free for people with ID from the department of Bolívar. Complimentary tickets can be requested —up to capacity— at the box office of the Hay Festival (Centro de Convenciones) showing your identification on the same day the event is taking place.

Daniel Samper Pizano and Enrique Santos are two of the sharpest commentators and analysts of Colombian current affairs. Whether via the digital platform Los Danieles, columns, analysis or memoires, they have spent over four decades closely following the national political panorama — sometimes at first hand. Sometimes offering shared perspectives, at other times their views have been opposing. They are in the process of finishing a book that tells the story of both voices. With the provisional title of Memorias charladas, it will gather their journalistic memories, full of humor, anecdotes and reflections around the practice of the profession in Colombia. Accompanied on stage by María Jimena Duzán.

All events on Saturday, January 31st will be free for people with ID from the department of Bolívar. Complimentary tickets can be requested —up to capacity— at the box office of the Hay Festival (Centro de Convenciones) showing your identification on the same day the event is taking place.