Guadalajara International Book Fair

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Guest of Honor Pavilion

Spain, Guest of Honor
Guest of Honor Pavilion
Crossroads. Humor, illustration and literature

The exercise of humor is an act of rebellion; a beneficial catharsis for the risorius muscle that provides levity when serious and solemn problems abound. Comedy is a complex matter for those who create using words or images. It seems paradoxical how, despite living in societies that constantly chant slogans in defense of freedom of expression, a "cancel culture" has arisen. Its guardians judge which values are correct, and they define the red lines of what can and cannot be said. The phenomenon affects all areas, including cultural content, and with it the humor, parody, caricature or irony that is described with words or told with images. What characteristics define the morphology of humor both in fiction and illustration? Do they overlap in any way? How are they different? Is any subject off limits to comedy? These are some of the issues that Luci Gutiérrez and Juan Pablo Villalobos will cover.

Luci Gutiérrez is a cartoonist and illustrator, the 2023 National Illustration Award winner and a benchmark in Spain and beyond. Author of mastheads, comic strips, and illustrations in various national and international media, she has also written over a dozen books.

Juan Pablo Villalobos won the 2016 Herralde Prize, and his works have been translated into more than a dozen languages. An explorer of humor in the history of literature, he has pushed corrosive humor to its limit. His casual voice demystifies the image of the writer, as well as themes as intricate as death, disease and organized crime.

Participants: Luci Gutiérrez, Juan Pablo Villalobos

Moderator: Jesús Ruiz Mantilla

Luci Gutiérrez

Invitado de Honor

(Barcelona, 1977), after finishing her studies in illustration at the Escuela Massana in Barcelona in 2001, has worked in fields as diverse as advertising, press and books.

In 2007, she lived for a time in New York. She didn't quite master English, but she drew and wrote enough to write English Is Not Easy, a book for learning it and of which many editions have been made all over the world.

In 2019, she published Manual de autodefensa, her second book as sole author, which makes it clear that life, like English, is not easy.

She has also illustrated Las mujeres y los hombres, which won a prize at the Bologna Fair in 2016, and other titles by the Italian publishing firm Orecchio Acerbo, such as L'albergo delle fiabe, Miss Galassia and La valigia delle carabattole.

Her stay in America also resulted in regular collaborations with The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker, where she illustrates the "Shouts & Murmurs" section weekly.

More recently, her work has been recognized with the Society of Illustrators Award in New York; the Gràffica Award, presented by design and visual communication professionals in Spain, and in 2023, she received the National Illustration Award from the Ministry of Culture.

Other activities involving the participant:
Social Context: Album and Comic as Engines of Change

Juan Pablo Villalobos

(Guadalajara, Jalisco, 1973) is the author of the novels Down the Rabbit Hole, Si viviéramos en un lugar normal, I’ll Sell You a Dog, I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me (Premio Herralde de Novela award 2016), Invasion of the spirit people, Peluquería y letras and El pasado anda atrás de nosotros. He has also published the chronicle The other side: stories of Central American teen refugees who dream of crossing the border and the children's novel Un viaje cósmico a Puerto Ficción.

His books have been translated into more than 15 languages. His novel I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me was adapted for the cinema by Fernando Frías de la Parra, and Down the Rabbit Hole by Manolo Caro.

He teaches writing at Pompeu Fabra University and Literature and Cultural Studies at the Escuela Superior de Cine y Audiovisuals de Cataluña.

He has lived outside Mexico since 2003. He currently resides in Barcelona, where he teaches literary workshops in his own space.

Other activities involving the participant:
In the lost footsteps of the family

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.