Javier Cercas

Cercas was born in the small town of Ibahernando, in Extremadura, in southwestern Spain, in 1962. At the age of four, he moved with his family to Girona, in Catalonia. He studied Hispanic Philology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, where he received a doctorate in 1991. Between 1987 and 1989, he taught at the University of Illinois, USA. He is currently a professor at the University of Girona, an honorary professor at the Diego Portales University in Chile, and an Honorary Fellow at Oxford University.

Since 2001, when his third novel, Soldiers of Salamis, was published, he has been regarded as “one of the most important writers in the Spanish language,” as Mario Vargas Llosa wrote. His novels have been translated into more than 30 languages and have won the most prestigious awards, including the Premio Nacional in Spain, the Premio Planeta, the Foreign Fiction Prize in the United Kingdom, the Premio Mondello in Italy, the Prix Malraux in France, the Premio de la Crítica in Chile, the Premio Correntes d’Escritas in Portugal, the Athens European Prize for Literature in Greece, the Taofen Award in China, and the Prize for Best European Novel, presented by the European Parliament.

He writes twice a month in the newspaper El País. He has received important non-fiction and journalism awards and various acknowledgements for his career, like the Eñe Award in Spain; the Prix Ulysse and Prix Dialogo in France, and the Premio del Salone del Libro di Torino, Premio Friuladria, Città di Vigevano, Premio Sicilia and Ennio Flaiano, all of them in Italy. He recently published his police novel trilogy, Terra Alta, and the non-fiction work No callar, which gathers his journalistic work written between 2000 and 2022.

Pepa Bueno

Invitado de Honor

(Badajoz, 1963)

Pepa has a degree in Journalism from the Universidad Complutense in Madrid. She began her career at the news services of Radio Nacional de España (RNE) in Extremadura, and subsequently became head of news at RNE in Aragon and Madrid. In 1991, she joined Televisión Española (TVE) to direct the regional news program, first in Andalusia and then in Madrid. In September 1996, she was named deputy director of the Gente news program.

Eight years later, she was put in charge of Los Desayunos on TVE, combining her responsibility with different duties in other programs on the same network. In 2009, she took over as director and presenter of the second edition of the Telediario on TVE, for which she received various awards, until in 2012, she joined the Hoy por Hoy program on the SER radio network, leading the ratings throughout her time at the helm.

In 2019, she was appointed director of the nightly news show Hora 25. During this stage, she also collaborated with programs on the Telecinco and Cuatro networks, combining her activity on television and radio with multiple collaborations in the press.

She has been the director of El País since August 2021.

Throughout her extensive career, she has earned numerous awards and acknowledgements, including the Micrófono de Oro, the Premio Media Tenor for best News Program in the World, Premio Ondas, Francisco Cerecedo Journalism Award, Salvador de Madariaga European Journalism Award, Manu Leguineche International Journalism Award, and the Agustín Merello Award of the Cádiz Press Association.

Jordi Gracia

Invitado de Honor

(Barcelona, 1965)

He is an essayist, professor of Spanish Literature at the Universidad de Barcelona, deputy to the director of El País and co-director of TintaLibre. He has written several books on the intellectual and literary history of Spain in the 20th century, a biography of Cervantes titled Miguel de Cervantes.La conquista de la ironía (2016), and one of José Ortega y Gasset in the collection of biographies “Españoles eminentes”. In 2004, he received the Premio Anagrama de Ensayo for La resistencia silenciosa. Fascismo y cultura en España, where he addressed, among other topics, how the Spanish exile is perceived from within. With A la intemperie. Exilio y cultura en España (2010), he reconstructs, through letters, books, and documents dating from 1939, the behaviors and emotions of Spanish exiles who adapted to their new environments.

 He has also dedicated works to Dionisio Ridruejo, including La vida rescatada de Dionisio Ridruejo. Other notable publications include Javier Pradera o el poder de la izquierda.Medio siglo de cultura democrática, El intelectual melancólico. Un panfleto and Contra la izquierda. Para seguir siendo de izquierdas en el siglo XXI.

Other activities involving the participant:

Journeys. Mexico: memory of hospitality

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
Paths in time
European Literature Festival
Two-way journeys of literary agents And a tribute to Antonia Kerrigan