Javier Zamora in conversation with Claudia Ayola

Cartagena 2025, Saturday 1 February 2025

The award-winning writer and poet Javier Zamora (El Salvador / United States) is the author of the poetry book Unaccompanied and the memoir Solito. In this last book, the author tells the story of his journey of over five thousand kilometres, between El Salvador and the United States, aged just nine. The civil war in El Salvador had expelled his family from the country, and the journey, which was meant to take two weeks, became a two-month odyssey, undertaken with a group of strangers and a “coyote” through Guatemala, Mexico and the Sonora Desert (the world’s most dangerous overland migratory route). Solito is the story of that time. In conversation with Claudia Ayola.