Hay Festival Cartagena 2024

Two historians talk to Ricardo Chica Gelis about events closely related to the history of Cartagena de Indias. With Carolina Aguado Serrano (Spain), an art historian and part of the technical coordination team for exhibitions and publications of the Dirección de Colecciones Reales de Patrimonio Nacional (Spain); she is co-author (alongside Mariela Beltrán García-Echániz) of La última batalla de Blas de Lezo, a comprehensive historical revision of the mariner's story. Jesús Sanjurjo (Spain) will talk about his book Con la sangre de nuestros hermanos. Historia del abolicionismo y del fin del comercio de esclavos en el Imperio español, 1800-1870, in which he sets out the complex history of abolitionist and anti-abolitionist discourses in Spain and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean during the 19th century. The study covers the ideological, political and diplomatic battle that occurred up and down the Atlantic in order to ban the slave trade in the last years of the Spanish Empire.

The Cartagena native Alfonso Múnera (Colombia) is a Doctor in Latin American and Caribbean History from the University of Connecticut; he has been Colombian Ambassador in Jamaica and in Trinidad and Tobago, as well as General Secretary of the Association of Caribbean States. He has written three essential works for understanding Colombian history: El fracaso de la nación, Fronteras imaginadas and La independencia de Colombia: olvidos y ficciones. He will talk about his work with Raúl Román.

Two writers, through fiction and non-fiction respectively, tell the life of the German explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, considered to be one of the fathers of modern geography. The acclaimed writer William Ospina (Colombia) presents his latest novel, Pondré mi oído en la piedra hasta que hable (2022), which deals with the time that the explorer spent in Colombia (from Cauca to Quindío, and from Magdalena to Barú). The historian Andrea Wulf (Germany/UK), winner of the 2013 Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writer's Award, is the author of the lauded biography of von Humboldt, The Invention of Nature (2016), a book that follows his footsteps up the world’s highest volcanoes, his trip along the River Orinoco, and his journeys to Siberia and even Cartagena de Indias. In conversation with Natalia García Freire.

Simultaneous translation from English to Spanish available

Philippe Sands (UK) talks to Javier Ortiz Cassiani about The Last Colony, a book about the Chagos Islands, which describes and censures the role of the UK in the expulsion of its native inhabitants in the 1960s. This prominent lawyer and human rights expert has not only documented these events, but also explores how the unjust acts have affected the lives of the inhabitants of the archipelago to this day, making a call for reparation of this colonial past.

Simultaneous translation from English to Spanish available

The family forms us and is one of the aspects that all societies have in common. In The World: A Family History, the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore (UK) shows us the history of humanity through some of its most important family dynasties. Starting with the fossils of the footprints of a family who walked along a beach 950,000 years ago, the author will examine some of the families that have given shape to our world: from the Medici and the Rothschilds to the Churchills, the Kennedys, the Kims and many more. In conversation with Andrea Bernal.

Simultaneous translation from English to Spanish available

All Sunday events will be free for people who has an ID expeded in the Bolívar Department. You must request their courtesy tickets at the box office of the Hay Festival (CCCI) showing your ID, between 22 and 28 of January.

The anthropologist, archaeologist and historian, Carl Henrik Langebaek (Colombia), lectures at the University of the Andes and is the author of the books Antes de Colombia, which covers 14 thousand years of history before the arrival of Columbus, and Conquistadores e indios. La historia no contada, which examines the conquest and colonization of the Americas with a critical viewpoint, understanding it as a complex process that has little to do with the simplified version we usually learn. The author offers a broad, fresh view on how cultures and communities interacted, the role of women, and dismantles some myths about how this process, particularly in the tropics, occurred. In conversation with Juan Carlos Flórez.

All Sunday events will be free for people who has an ID expeded in the Bolívar Department. You must request their courtesy tickets at the box office of the Hay Festival (CCCI) showing your ID, between 22 and 28 of January.

We are interested in cultural management projects that manage to unite quality programming with inclusion and innovation. Book Bunk (in Nairobi, Kenya) is precisely that: a cultural project for the recovery of public libraries with profoundly positive impacts on the communities where it works. The Hay Festival International Director, Cristina Fuentes La Roche (Spain), Wanjiru Koinange (Kenya) and Angela Wachuka (Kenya) will talk to Margarita Valencia about the challenges of their projects and about international collaboration among countries of the South.

Simultaneous translation from English to Spanish available

All Sunday events will be free for people who has an ID expeded in the Bolívar Department. You must request their courtesy tickets at the box office of the Hay Festival (CCCI) showing your ID, between 22 and 28 of January.