Hay Festival Medellín 2024

The writer and environmental activist Gabi Martínez (Spain) is the author of nine books, including both novels and non-fiction. He is the Director of the Literatura Festival and won the 2022 Serondaya Prize, he is a founding member of the Caravana Negra Association in the defence of culture and nature, and of the Urban and Territorial Ecology Foundation. Furthermore, he is the Co-director of the Animales Invisibles project. His most recent book is Delta, a work that brings to light the reality of the Ebro Delta, which is returning to the sea: the Mediterranean advances on the land at a speed of about ten metres a year. Eduardo Romero García tells a powerful story that links the lives of an old man in Asturias, once a miner, with those of some Afro-Colombian women who reach Europe, and a group of Colombian migrants who flee their country and when they reach their destination they find ships that have brought coal from La Guajira, to a Spanish port. In conversation with Luz Helena Oviedo.

Latin America is upset. The polls show it, the succession of "social outbreakts" in diferent countries confirm it, and citizens who vote with disillusionment ratify it. In his book Repúblicas defraudadas, the Peruvian academic Alberto Vergara establishes that this general unrest is due to the mulple forms of stagnation in which Latin America finds itself:political, economic and social, and he examines the structural causes of this discontent, which include a lack of security for citizens, insufficient health and education services, economic factors, segregation, racism and corruption, illustrating and supporting his arguments with examples from popular culture, including the films Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma and Luis Puenzo’s La historia oficial, and the songs of Caetano Veloso. Alberto will talk about these challenges with the principal of EAFIT University, Claudia Restrepo.

Head of the Barcelona Agency for Urban Ecology since its creation in 2000, Salvador Rueda (Spain) is a committed professional who promotes urban projects that take the environment into account. With studies in Biology, Psychology, Environmental Engineering and Energy Management, he was an EU urban environment expert between 1994 and 2000. In conversation with the writer and activist Gabi Martínez (Spain), he will go into detail about strategic, habitable and sustainable urban models.

Recognised by the Ministry of Equality of Spain for her contribution to making visible trans women, Alana S. Portero is a historian, writer, dramatist, theatre director and LGTBIQ+ activist. She will talk about her first novel, La mala costumbre, which tells the moving story of the childhood and teenage years of a girl who grows up in a body that feels strange to her. Set in Madrid in the 1980s and 90s, the text deals with the uneasiness and resentment caused by a society that, unable to accept difference, distorts it. In conversation with Sara Jaramillo Klinkert.