Guadalajara International Book Fair

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Literary Program

Spain, Guest of Honor
Literary Program
Paths in time

The relationship between historical accounts and fiction is a formula that has worked over time, and has had various expressions in Spanish literature. But perhaps never with the success and proliferation of recent years thanks to authors who have given their novels an international setting. As a result, we have readers who are eager to learn about this literary genre who may be looking for clues as to where we come from through the most relevant events of other times. Of their creation, of how these narratives are built and documented.

Participants: María Dueñas, Santiago Posteguillo

Moderator: Winston Manrique Sabogal

María Dueñas

Invitado de Honor

(Puertollano, Ciudad Real, 1964) has a PhD in English Philology. After two decades dedicated to academia, she entered the world of literature in 2009 with The Time in Between, the novel that made her a publishing sensation and whose television adaptation by Antena 3 earned numerous awards and spectacular ratings success. Her later works, The Heart Has Its Reasons (2012), The Vineyard (2015) and Las hijas del Capitán (2018), continued to appeal to readers and critics alike.

Translated into more than 35 languages and with millions of copies sold worldwide, María Dueñas has become one of the most highly regarded authors in Spain and Latin America.

Sira is her fifth novel.

Santiago Posteguillo

Invitado de Honor

Posteguillo has a European PhD from the University of Valencia and is currently a professor at Jaume I University in Castellón. He has studied creative literature in the United States, and linguistics and translation at various universities in the United Kingdom.

In 2006, he published his first novel, Africanus.El hijo del cónsul, the start of a trilogy that continued with Las legiones malditas and La traición de Roma. He is also the author of the Trilogy of Trajan, made up Los asesinos del emperador, Circo Máximo and La legión perdida.

He received the Premio a las Letras Award from the Government of Valencia in 2010, the Barcino Award for Historic Novel of Barcelona in 2014 and, in 2018, he received the Planeta Award for his novel Yo, Julia, which was followed by Y Julia retó a los dioses in 2020. He is the best-selling author of Spanish historical novels with more than 4,500,000 readers. In 2018, he was a guest lecturer at Cambridge University's Sydney Sussex College.

After the success of I Am Rome, he continued his most ambitious literary project: a series of novels dedicated to the life of Julius Caesar.

Winston Manrique Sabogal

He is a Colombian-Spanish journalist and founder and director of WMagazín, a global digital literary and cultural magazine based in Spain. His vocation is pan-Hispanic and itinerant, participating in the leading fairs and gatherings of writers and the book universe in both America and Europe. This pioneering project caters to a dual, analog, and virtual world, featuring special editions in PDF and print that enrich journalistic genres and explore new narratives through individual and group video interviews, photo stories, video stories, and video chats with both established and emerging authors, as well as professionals in the field.

He collaborates with the Spanish newspaper El País, where he worked for 19 years as an editor and head of books and literature for the Babelia supplement and the Culture section, and was co-editor of its digital edition and the blog Papeles perdidos. He has interviewed leading writers and book professionals from around the world over the past few decades and has written reports on literary creation, the publishing industry, and the promotion of reading. From this work came the titles El destino del libro, Latinoamérica contra los tópicos and Historias del Boom.50 años de la literatura que cambió el español (El País-Amazon).

In Colombia, he worked for the newspapers El Espectador and El Tiempo, the Colombian news agency Colprensa (Research Unit), and the radio newspaper Agrohuila. He reported on issues ranging from the coffee crisis and alliances between paramilitary and religious sects, to social and cultural trends.

He is the author of La gran transformación: la belleza, el amor, el sexo y la felicidad en el siglo XXI (Galaxia Gutenberg), a work that analyzes the accelerated metamorphosis of these four great desires that are changing life. Over two hundred people, from writers and artists to philosophers and sociologists, have contributed to his journalistic articles since the 1990s.

Other activities involving the participant:
"Childness" Landscape in motion
A question of class: stories of fiction and non-fiction
The "other people": animals and nature in literature
Crossroads. Journalism and literature
European Literature Festival
Two-way journeys of literary agents And a tribute to Antonia Kerrigan