At Hay Festival Querétaro. Image: Hay Festival, Daniel Mordzinski
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
‘A Vibrant Strand of Conversations’
Close on the heels of the programming information released for Hay Festival Segovia in Spain, the program for the Mexican iteration of the Hay Festival in Querétaro has been announced by the organizers.
Hay Festival Querétaro has today (July 20) announced the lineup for the 13th staging of the event in Mexico, September 6 to 9. Listed as the program’s key themes are global activism, US policy, innovations in STEM, and gender equality. The program is expected to include 140 speakers in 106 events during its four days.
In her prepared statement on the announcement of programming, the company’s international director Cristina Fuentes La Roche is quoted, describing the concept as one of “showcasing the very best of national and international literature alongside a vibrant strand of conversations that take on the big issues of the day: from gender equality to US policy, from the challenges of investigative journalism to innovations in tech.”
At Hay Festival Querétaro. Image: Hay Festival, Caleidoscopio
Highlights of Hay Festival Querétaro 2018
International authors speaking on the agenda:
- Americans André Aciman, Lydia Davis and Vivian Gormick
- Canada’s Rosemary Sullivan
- The UK’s Jeanette Winterson and David Keenan
- Italy’s Andrea Marcolongo
- Argentina’s Elsa Osorio and Patricio Pron
- Chile’s Alejandro Zambra
- Spain’s Agustín Fernández Mallo, Sergio del Molino, Vicente Molina Foix, Juan José Millás and Manuel Vilás
Mexican writers slated to appear comprise Margo Glantz, Mario Bellatin, Guillermo Fadanelli, Monica Lavin, Jorge Zepeda Patterson, and Claudina Domingo.
The festival’s long-running programming around its Bogotá39 anthology of emerging Latin American writers is represented this time by Emiliano Monge, Eduardo Rabasa, Mónica Ojeda, Daniel Saldaña París and Jesús Miguel Soto. A concurrent series of events in The Wild Detectives bookshop in Dallas, Texas, USA, will feature Juan Cárdenas, Gabriela Jauregui, Brenda Lozano, and Eduardo Rabasa.
Two Nobel laureates appear:
- The first Muslim woman and the first Iranian person to win the Nobel Peace Prize (2003), Shirin Ebadi is a human rights attorney in her country
- Venki Ramakrishnan, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in chemistry, for his work in molecular biology.
Innovations in STEM are also part of the program, in conversations with evolutionary biologist Antonio Lazcano, mathematician Marcus du Sautoy, geneticist Miguel Pita, and anthropologist Agustín Fuentes.
Artists and thinkers scheduled for the event are singer-songwriters Patti Smith and Amandititita; Buddhist nun Kankyo Tannier; and Mexican actor Tenoch Huerta; in addition to music from Celso Piña and his Ronda Bogotá.
Journalists are represented onstage by the winner of the Princess of Asturias Award for Communication, Alma Guillermoprieto, as well as by Lydia Cacho, Gabriela Warkentin, Denisse Dresser, Marcela Turati, Salvador Camarena, Alejandra Gonzalez, Nayeli Roldan, Pablo Ferri, and Andrés Oppenheimer.
Illustrators and cartoonists announced for the show this year include the team behind Illegal, Eoin Colfer, Andrew Donkin and Giovanni Rigano; Colombia’s Powerpaola; Spain’s María Hesse and Raquel Riba Rossy; America’s Peter Kuper; Mexico’s Bef; and caricaturist duo Liniers and Montt.
As mentioned in connection with the Segovia event, Hay Festival is one of 10 European cultural institutions participating in Wom@rts, with an intention of highlighting the contribution of women to cultural heritage and diversity, and to tackling gender inequality by supporting women’s work on the world stage. Between 2018 and 2021, organizers say, a series of festival events will be co-programmed with Wom@rts to interrogate these issues.
Hay Festivalito and Hay Joven strands of programming feature workshops and events for young people with speakers including Benito Taibo, Olga de Dios, Eoin Colfer, Tamar Cohen, Rocio Bonilla, Alfredo Núñez Lanz, and Andrew Donkin.
Details and ticket availabilities can be found here. Twenty-five per cent of mainstage event capacity is available free to students in the case of the Querétaro event.
More from Publishing Perspectives on the Hay Festival and its events is here.