Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi and Guatemalan author Eduardo Halfon discuss the ideas of collapse, language, kinship and memory that show up in both of their works, with literary journalist and translator Ángel Gurría-Quintana.

Colanzi’s short stories (You Glow in the Dark, Our Dead World) build eerie dystopian landscapes out of the decimated ruins of post-nuclear Latin America, in a style that feels both very real and completely otherworldly. Guatemalan writer Halfon’s Tarantula explores the traumatic childhood episode of two brothers in an immersive Jewish camp that ends up turning into a militarised nightmare. Halfon was named one of the 39 most promising young Latin American writers by Hay Festival in Bogotá.

How can ancient cultures open up our senses and help us dream of a better collective future? Bringing together ideas, traditions and perspectives from indigenous cultures, Brazilian anthropologist Hanna Limulja considers how dreaming is a form of indigenous resistance and hope while Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi reflects on how environmental devastation and neoliberal violence threaten to create a dreamless future. They talk to British Library curator Polly Russell.

In You Glow in the Dark, Colanzi imagines eerie, post-nuclear futures where survival and postcolonial revolution are the norm, while Limulja’s work focuses on how dreams have been part of the territorial and cultural struggle of the Yanomami people.

Spaces for buying and selling, socialisation and discovery, bookshops are also the subjects of literature and for interpretation. Often readers create strong links with their local bookshops, and these links develop into relationships that can last a lifetime. From this personal, almost intimate, perspective, three writers and a bookseller will talk about the love created, as well as the fallings out that can also happen on the way. With Liliana Colanzi and Socorro Venegas in conversation with Lola Larumbe.

Liliana Colanzi (Bolivia) has a doctorate in Comparative Literature from Cornell University, where she now lectures. In 2015 she won the Aura Estrada Prize and in 2017 she was selected for the Bogotá39 list of 39 of the best Latin American fiction writers aged under 40. She has a publishing project in Bolivia called Dum Dum, is the author of the books of short stories Vacaciones permanentes and Nuestro mundo muerto. Her last work is Ustedes brillan en lo oscuro, a collection of stories that explore narratives through time and space on the exuberant historical and geographical riches of Latin America, a book that won the Ribera del Duero Prize. In conversation with the fiction writer and essayist Dahlia de la Cerda.

This is the first of two sessions introducing the most exciting voices of Latin American fiction, stars of the 2018 selection for Bogotà 39 and launching the English-language edition of a globally published anthology. Colanzi is a Bolivian short story writer and editor whose work includes the collection Our Dead World. Restrepo Pombo is the editor of Gatopardo magazine and of the anthology The Sorrows of Mexico. His fiction appears in the Bogotà 39 Anthology. Fonseca was born in Costa Rica and grew up in Puerto Rico. His novel Colonel Lagrimas is available in English. They read and talk to Daniel Hahn.

Four authors who combine writing with other occupations, in this case publishing, journalism and academia, talk about what it means to move between the different worlds in which they live and work. They will also talk about their latest books with the publisher José Hamad. Liliana Colanzi (Bolivia), Eduardo Rabasa (Mexico), Mariana Torres (Brazil) and Diego Zúñiga (Chile).