Hay Festival Jericó 2025
Event 14
Melba Escobar in conversation with Ana Cristina Restrepo
Las huérfanas
Teatro Santamaría
Read moreMelba Escobar is a columnist and writer, the author of the young adult novel Johnny y el mar, the non-fiction Cuando éramos felices pero no lo sabíamos, and the novels Duermevela, La casa de la belleza, La mujer que hablaba sola and her recent Las huérfanas. This book portrays Myriam de Nogales, the author’s mother: “a woman, unattainable in her skills and talents, passionate, caustic, wounded and wounding, brilliant”. Melba Escobar will talk to Ana Cristina Restrepo about this novel that delves into the family past, origins, the creation of a female identity, and the place of the dead, who never die in the minds of the living.
-
Event 15
José Zuleta Ortiz with Juan Diego Mejía
The other versions of the events
Museo de Arte Religioso
Read moreFor 15 years, José Zuleta Ortiz ran the Libertad Bajo Palabra programme, a series of writing workshops for convicts in Colombian prisons. He won the National Literature Prize for a novel published by the Ministry of Culture in 2022 for Lo que no fue dicho. His new novel, Una versión de los hechos, tells the story of a friendship among three characters: a prisoner from a women’s prison, a literature teacher, and a publisher who returns from exile in Spain. These intertwined lives form the narrative thread that leads to a reflection on complex and powerful ideas: political correction, justice within the law, art as a way to liberation, clandestinity and imprisonment, and versions of events that lie behind the official histories. In conversation with Juan Diego Mejía.
-
Event P2
Screening of Los Inseparables
Parque principal
Read moreA runaway puppet with boundless imagination and an abandoned stuffed animal toy in need of a friend cross paths in Central Park and pair up against all odds for an epic adventure in the city of New York.
Director: Jeremie Degruson
Duration: 90 minutes
-
Event 16
Alma Guillermoprieto in conversation with Juanita León
Narrating the Americas
Teatro Santamaría
Read moreA reporter and writer, Alma Guillermoprieto began her career in Nicaragua during the Sandinista struggle. She covered the conflicts in Central America for the newspapers The Washington Post and The Guardian, and has written tirelessly since then about Latin America for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, National Geographic magazine, and occasionally for El País. In 2008, urged by Gabriel García Márquez, she took the Julio Cortázar Chair at the University of Guadalajara. The many awards granted to her have included the 2018 Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities, the MacArthur Fellowship and the Ortega y Gasset Prize (from El País) for her life work. As an educator, she has given courses on Latin America at the universities of Harvard, Chicago, Princeton and California-Berkeley, and on scientific journalism at the Universidad Javeriana de Bogotá. In her most recent publication, La vida toda. Nueva crónica estadounidense (2022), Guillermoprieto compiles and edits 13 reports that portray social and political life in the United States. An anthology that takes an in-depth look at one of the most influential countries in the world, seen from the inside. She will talk to Juanita León.
-
With the support of Fontur
Event 17
Gioconda Belli in conversation with Melba Escobar
Literature and resistance
Museo de Arte Religioso
Read moreThe acclaimed Nicaraguan poet and novelist Gioconda Belli is also known for her commitment to her country’s political and social struggle. Her works explore matters such as feminism, love and revolution, combining a poetic sensibility with the denunciation of injustice. Belli participated actively in the Sandinista movement, something that has formed an important influence on her work, given that in it women held a central place as agents of change and resistance. Over the course of her career she has won numerous awards, including the 1978 Casa de las Américas Prize and the Biblioteca Breve Prize in 2008. Her most famous works are The Inhabited Woman (1994) and El país de las mujeres (2010), which are about the search for identity and the struggle for freedom in contexts of oppression. Her latest book is Un silencio lleno de murmullos, a story about absence, silence and family links; after the death of Valeria in Spain, her daughter travels from Nicaragua to look after the things that she has left behind. Surrounded by these objects, Penélope symbolically meets her mother again, and starts to reflect on what was left unsaid between them. In conversation with Melba Escobar.
-
Principal Sponsor
Government Partner
