Hay Festival Cartagena 2024

Our book clubs are intimate events with guests selected from the Hay Festival programme. These small-scale events will be a chance to talk in depth about the most recent work published by those invited. At this event, Gabriela Wiener (Peru) will talk to David Lara Ramos about her book Huaco retrato. A huaco retrato is a piece of ceramic made by the native peoples of Peru. In 1878, the Austrian Jewish explorer Charles Wiener, the author’s great-great-grandfather, carried four thousand pre-Colombian pieces away from Peru, in the process gaining recognition at the Paris Universal Exhibition. The protagonist faces up to this instance of stolen memory and reflects on their history and on the consequences of colonization and racism in our lives.

The book should be read before attending.

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