Hay Festival Cartagena 2025

To open the Hay Festival Comunitario programme, the journalist Catalina Gómez Ángel offers her traditional workshop for reporters. For over ten years, the Hay Festival Cartagena has been running this community journalism project in which, guided by a professional, participants learn to find new ways of putting their surroundings into words.

Tatiana Velásquez (Colombia), co-founder and reporter for La Contratopedia Caribe. Social communicator and journalist, graduate of the Autonomous University of the Caribbean (in Barranquilla) with a Master’s in Investigative Journalism, Data and Visualisation from the Rey Juan Carlos University in Spain, with a Google fellowship. She has worked at the Colombian media organisations El Heraldo, El Tiempo and La Silla Vacía, and has published articles in El Espectador, Spain’s El Confidencial, Vice Latinoamérica and ColombiaCheck. At this event, she will give a journalism workshop.

A conversation about Guillermo Cano, a figure to whom we are in debt for his determined journalistic ethic and commitment to the freedom of expression, and whose murder we continue to remember as one of the greatest losses in the history of our country. Almost a century after his birth, we celebrate the life and legacy of the journalist, writer and editor of El Espectador newspaper. With María Jimena Duzán (Colombia), journalist, political commentator and writer; Daniel Coronell (Colombia), director of Los Danieles and Head of News at Univisión; and María Elvira Samper (Colombia), an award-winning writer and journalist who has been at the helm of a number of Colombian news organisations. In conversation with Juan David Correa.

How can we travel towards literature from journalism? How do both fields coexist and feed each other? This workshop will explore the bond between journalism and literature through the format of journalistic books and will analyze the path towards telling true stories with literary tools, as Abraham Jiménez Enoa did in Aterrizar en el mundo, a travel writing book about the cities of the West where the author lived during his first year outside of Cuba, which won the Michael Jacobs Travel Writing Grant in 2023. In this book, the author tells the story of his arrival in Europe and the memories of his last years in Cuba, offering an intimate and critical view of Cuban reality.

Yomi Adegoke is a British writer and journalist, author of The List, winner of the Groucho Maverick and Marie Claire Future Shapers awards, and included on the Forbes 30 under 30 list. Johny Pitts (United Kingdom) is a television presenter, writer and photographer, as well as an editor at the electronic magazine Afropean.com, an essential guide for the Afro-European diaspora, and now a book: Afropean. Notes from Black Europe. In conversation with Mónica Moreno Figueroa.

Consecutive interpretation from English to Spanish available

The writer and journalist Leila Guerriero (Argentina) presents her book La llamada, a profile of the Argentine Silvia Labayru, a member of the armed group Montoneros and who in 1976 was kidnapped, tortured and raped at the Escuela de Mecánica la Armada clandestine detention centre, where thousands of people were held and murdered during the dictatorship. Labayru survived the experience, and was interviewed by Guerriero, beginning in 2021, while waiting for the outcome of the first trial for crimes of sexual violence committed against women who disappeared during the dictatorship, at which Labayru was a plaintiff. In conversation with Ana Cristina Restrepo.

The writer Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and was raised in the United States. A professor at the University of Southern California, he has received Guggenheim and MacArthur foundation fellowships. Author of the acclaimed The Sympathizer, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, he has also written the short story collection The Refugees, the book of non-fiction Nothing Ever Dies, finalist for the National Book Award, and he edited the anthology of refugee writings The Displaced. His recent publication, A Man of Two Faces, is a brilliant memoir that tells the life story of Nguyen as a refugee, and his identity, both Vietnamese and American. In conversation with Óscar Guardiola-Rivera.

Simultaneous interpretation from English to Spanish available

Yomi Adegoke (UK) is a multi-award-winning journalist and author. She is currently a columnist at the Guardian and British Vogue. She’s written for the Sunday Times, the Independent, Stylist, and the New Statesman, among others, and in 2018, she cowrote the bestselling book Slay in Your Lane and in the same year was named one of the most influential people in London by the Evening Standard. She was named in 2021 one of Forbes 30 under 30. She speaks with Jonathan Levi about her last book, The List.

Simultaneous interpretation available from English to Spanish

All Sunday 2 February events will be free for people from the department of Bolívar. Complimentary tickets can be requested at the box office of the Hay Festival (Centro de Convenciones) showing your ID, between 27 Janaury and 2 February.