Edurne Portela

Invitado de Honor

Portela has a degree in History (University of Navarre), a PhD in Hispanic Literature (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA) and was a professor of literature at Lehigh University (Pennsylvania) until 2015. There, she combined her teaching work with running the Humanities Center and other management positions. As part of her academic research, she published numerous articles on the representation of political violence in contemporary Spanish and Argentine culture, and the essay Displaced Memories:The Poetics of Trauma in Argentine Women’s Writing.

Since 2016, she has lived in Spain and published with Galaxia Gutenberg El eco de los disparos:Cultura y memoria de la violencia (2016), and the novels Mejor la ausencia (2017, Award in 2018 for best fiction book of the year of the Guild of Bookstores of Madrid and International Literary Award of the City of Cassino, Italy), Formas de estar lejos (2019) and Los ojos cerrados (2021, Euskadi Award for Spanish Literature 2022 and Estado Crítico Award 2022). Her latest novel is Maddi y las fronteras (2023).

In 2017, she produced the documentary Vida y ficción, together with José Ovejero. She has given numerous lectures on matters of memory, history, violence and their representation in literature. In 2021, she curated the conference series “Beyond Auschwitz: exceptional and continued mass violence in 20th-century Europe” for the Koldo Mitxelena center in San Sebastián.

She writes regularly for various newspapers and magazines and collaborates with several Spanish radio stations (Radio Nacional de España, SER, Radio Euskadi). Since 2021, she has worked for Galaxia Gutenberg as an editor, creating her own collection of fiction and non-fiction.

Cristina Sánchez-Andrade

Invitado de Honor

Writer, literary critic and translator. She has a degree in Information Sciences and Law, and was born in Santiago de Compostela.

Her works include La nostalgia de la Mujer Anfibio (Anagrama, 2022), the storybook El niño que comía lana (Anagrama, 2019) and Winterlings (Anagrama, 2014), which have been translated into several languages. She has written novels, the stories, essays and poems.

Her awards include the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award (Guadalajara Book Fair, Mexico), the Julio Camba Journalism Award (2019) and the Setenil Award for the best book of stories published in Spain. Her work as a translator includes books such as Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, and the biography on Clarice Lispector by Benjamin Moser, Why This World.

She currently lives in Madrid, where she combines her work as a novelist with university teaching and with collaborations in various media outlets, including La Voz de Galicia and El País.

Jesús Ruiz Mantilla

Invitado de Honor

(Santander, 1965) is a writer. Throughout his career, he has worked in fiction, non-fiction and poetry. He is the author of the novels Los ojos no ven; Preludio; Yo, Farinelli, el capón; Gordo (Sent Soví Award in 2005); Ahogada en llamas; La cáscara amarga; Hotel Transition (Fernando Quiñones Novel Award in 2015); El encuentro and Papel. In other genres, he has written Placer contra placer, Contar la música, and Divos, which reflect his journey as a music journalist over three decades for the newspaper El País, and Al día (Galaxia Gutenberg), a poetic experiment that blends a diary with poems drawn from everyday experiences reflected in the diary entries. For El País, he has spent most of his career in journalism in the Culture sections, or in the Babelia and El País Semanal supplements. He has also collaborated with the “The Window” and “Today” radio programs on Cadena Ser.

He is a professor in the CEU's Master's in Cultural Journalism, at the El País school, and he has taught university courses in Spain, Latin America and the United States. As a cultural manager, he is the artistic director of the Eñe festivals in Madrid and Málaga; of the Festival Internacional de Literatura en Español (FILE) in Extremadura and Murcia, and in Fronteras in Valencia, where he mixes musicians with writers. In addition, he is part of the team behind Creadores, a documentary series conceived by Alberto Anaut for La Fábrica, the leading cultural management company in Spain, of which he is a member of the executive team. The series is produced by Amazon, Radio Televisión Española (RTVE), and the Fundación La Caixa, and features ten-hour interviews with various artists from the Spanish-speaking world.

Other activities involving the participant:

Once upon a time was love
The labyrinth of intrigue
Crossroads. Humor, illustration and literature