Hay Festival Cartagena 2025

Rafael Yuste is an esteemed Spanish neuroscientist with an international profile, Director of the NeuroTechnology Center at Columbia University, and one of the drivers of the BRAIN initiative, funded by the Barak Obama administration. Since, 2011, this initiative has been investigating each and every one of the neurons in the human brain. Yuste presents his first work of science communication: El cerebro, el teatro del mundo. For Yuste, understanding the mysteries of the brain puts us at the dawn of a new renaissance, a new humanism that will allow us to take a historical step that can help future generations plan a better world. Yuste is also a leader when it comes to the creation of neurorights, which are new rights for the protection of brain activity and brain data. This protection is necessary because of the rapid development of neurotechnology. In conversation with Sylvie Duchamp.

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 January and 2 February.

In 2025, the Hay Festival celebrates 20 years of conversations and thought in Colombia. To mark the anniversary, we have run a collaborative project in which Colombian society has helped us to put the twenty key questions for our time. Festival guests will bring a wide ranging focus to the conversation, including perspectives from both the global south and the north, and based on the following questions: How can economic degrowth be made an attractive alternative? How would the legalisation of drugs affect the world economy? What can the city learn from the countryside, and vice versa? With Anne Applebaum (United States), Nataliya Gumenyuk (Ukraine) and Jorge Ramos (Mexico / United States). They will talk to Clara Elvira Ospina.

Simultaneous interpretation from English to Spanish available

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.

Peter Frankopan (Croatia / United Kingdom) is Professor of Global History at Oxford University, where he directs the Centre for Byzantine Research, and is a Senior Researcher at Worcester College. He is also UNESCO Professor of Silk Roads Studies and a bye-fellow at King's College, Cambridge. Called a “literary star” by The Times and a “rock star don” by the BBC, his work has been acclaimed internationally, particularly his book The Silk Roads. His latest work, The Earth Transformed. An Untold Story, has been praised for its wide-ranging and erudite analysis of how the environment has moulded global history. In conversation with Andrea Bernal.

Simultaneous interpretation from English to Spanish available

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.

Paula Moreno Zapata, author of Soñar lo imposible and El poder de lo invisible, will engage in a conversation with Gilbert Shang Ndi, a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Bayreuth and author of several works exploring the African experience and its diaspora. In this conversation, the participants will discuss relevant authors who have not yet been translated and who are significant to the realities of Colombia and the Americas. They will also share their experiences studying African literature, highlighting its icons and the resonances it holds in the American continent.

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.

Colson Whitehead (United States) is a writer who has been recognised with the prestigious MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, and who has taught at various universities. His first novel, The Intuitionist, was a PEN / Hemingway Award winner, and also won the Quality Paperback Book Club's New Voices Award. With John Henry Days he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and won the Young Lions Fiction Award. His novels The Nickel Boys and The Underground Railway won, among other awards, the Pulitzer Prize. His most recent book is Crook Manifesto. In conversation with Mayra Santos-Febres.

Colson Whitehead will participate in this event digitally.

Simultaneous interpretation from English to Spanish available

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.

Susan Neiman (United States) is an outstanding philosopher and writer known for her contributions in the fields of moral philosophy, the Enlightenment, metaphysics and politics. Educated at Harvard, Neiman has taught at Yale and the University of Tel Aviv, and, since 2000 has directed the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany. Her new book, Left Is Not Woke, is a critical examination of the distinction between the principles of the left and the phenomenon sometimes known as woke, arguing that the true spirit of the left is based on universalism, justice and the possibility of progress, values that she considers have been distorted by some contemporary currents which prioritise tribal identities, tending towards conservatism. In conversation with Laura Quintana.

Simultaneous interpretation from English to Spanish available

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.

The writer and historian Anne Applebaum (United States), winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction for Gulag. A History and author of Twilight of Democracy. The seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, goes into greater depth in this direction with Autocracy Inc. The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, a book that won the German Booksellers’ Peace Prize. As well as offering a study of the methods of modern autocrats, Applebaum uncovers an intricate network that links totalitarian regimes to the financial world, security services that are dedicated to espionage, and talented propagandists. In conversation with José Manuel Acevedo.

Simultaneous interpretation from English to Spanish available

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.

Melba Escobar talks to Colombian artists who are also cultural actors and managers. With Juan Diego Mejía, a writer who is very tuned into our times and a noted cultural manager: he founded and ran the Medellin University channel, Canal U, and directed Cultura Ciudadana and the Medellin Book and Culture Festival his most recent book is Y si acaso yo muero en la guerra. José Zuleta Ortiz directed the Libertad Bajo Palabra initiative (running writing workshops for convicts in Colombian prisons) for 15 years, and won the National Literature Prize for a novel published by the Ministry of Culture in 2022 with Lo que no fue dicho. His latest novel, Una versión de los hechos, tells the story of friendship among three characters.

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.

Edward Chancellor (United Kingdom) is a financial historian, journalist and investment strategist. His articles have been published in outlets including the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal. Here he presents The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest, which tells the story of the economy up to our own times. This work of non-fiction, winner of the Hayek Award for best book of 2023, is inspired by the conviction that the artificial reduction of interest rates has created many of our current problems, including the rise of populism. In conversation with Mónica Jaramillo.

Simultaneous interpretation from English to Spanish available

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 January and 2 February.

This event forms part of the Literary Pairs series run by Hay Festival and the British Council; as part of the initiative, each pair will repeat their conversation at the 2025 Hay-on-Wye Festival (Wales, United Kingdom). With Johny Pitts (United Kingdom), television presented, writer and photographer, as well as a curator of the electronic magazine Afropean.com, a successful mouthpiece of the Afro-European diaspora and now a book, Afropean: Notes From Black Europe. He will talk to Óscar Guardiola-Rivera (Colombia), a writer, philosopher, lecturer in Law and Human Rights at Birkbeck (University of London), and author of Si Latinoamérica gobernase el mundo, in which Guardiola reflects on the development of European capitalism, built based on flows of money from Mexico and the Andean silver mine of Potosi, looking in depth at the recent history of the development economies of Latin American and the Caribbean. His most recent book is Under the World. In conversation with Camila Osorio.

Simultaneous interpretation from English to Spanish available

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.

This year we celebrate 20 years in Colombia: two decades of conversations, debates, questions, music, film, photography and books. Through the voices of some of the festival’s most iconic guests, as well as those who make this great festival of ideas possible, we mark the date and wish a long life to the Hay Festival in Colombia through this special documentary.

Duration: 1 hour, 23 minutes

Direction: Gustavo Gordillo