Guadalajara International Book Fair

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Special activities for professionals from Spain, Guest of Honor

Activities for Professionals
Special activities for professionals from Spain, Guest of Honor
Two-way journeys of literary agents And a tribute to Antonia Kerrigan

The literary agents are a figure that is almost unknown to the reader. And yet, they provide crucial support to authors. They not only confer prestige on their work on the national and international market, but they are also an increasingly decisive link in the production and circulation of books. The present holds major challenges for an industry in constant flux. The diversity of consumption patterns and the proliferation of digital media to the detriment of traditional media are significant issues that are already impacting the publishing world and, consequently, literary agents. How do you work with authors who spend their time not only writing their books, but who are required to also devote it to other types of non-literature activities? How do you lay out strategies within a globalized market that is controlled by large publishing groups? How do you work with the small and medium-sized publishers that are starting to appeal more to many young or inexperienced writers? Do the latter provide a better way to introduce authors outside their country and/or language? These and other issues are what define these two-way journeys of current-day agents.

Participants: Claudia Calva, Paula Canal, Maribel Luque, Sergio Ramírez, Bernat Fiol

Moderator: Winston Manrique Sabogal

Claudia Calva

Invitado de Honor

(Mexico, 1978) studied Economics and earned a Master’s in Project Evaluation at the Universidad Panamericana. She worked at IPADE and the Bank of Mexico and later participated in founding the Mexican Council for Economic and Financial Education. She was a curator at the Museum of Economics in Mexico City and a creator of financial education content for the Mexican Banking Association. She later pursued a Master’s in Communication and Education at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, where she currently resides. In 2011, she began her career in the publishing world, thanks to the trust of Antonia Kerrigan, who gave her the opportunity to train as a literary agent. She now co-directs the Antonia Kerrigan Literary Agency alongside Hilde Gersen.

Paula Canal

Invitado de Honor

(Vigo, Spain, 1974) has a degree in Hispanic Philology, a diploma in Philosophy from the Universidad de Navarra, and a Master’s in Cultural Management from the University of Edinburgh, where she graduated with a thesis on the Fixed Book Price Law (Lang Law) and the problems its elimination caused for the publishing industry in the UK.

She worked for 17 years at Anagrama, a publishing house in Barcelona, where she was responsible for selling author rights and developing the publisher's digital content. Since 2016, she has been a literary agent at Indent Literary Agency, based in New York, primarily representing Latin American and Spanish authors for the international market, from emerging voices to well-established writers, with a special interest in narrative journalism. Among the Mexican authors she represents are Alma Guillermoprieto (2018 Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities), Guadalupe Nettel, Emiliano Monge, Jazmina Barrera, and others.

She has participated in editor fellowships organized by the Book Fairs of Amsterdam (2011), Turin (2010 and 2016), Rome (2008), Seoul (2014), The Hague (2015), and Quebec (2015).

She has taken part in workshops on Cultural Policies in Aarhus (Denmark) and Moscow, organized by the European Network of Cultural Administration Training Centers. And she has taught sessions in various editing and copyright workshops in Havana, Madrid, Mexico City, Santo Domingo, Quito, and Medellín.

Maribel Luque

Invitado de Honor

She has a degree in Hispanic Philology from the Universidad de Barcelona. She joined the Carmen Balcells Literary Agency in 1987, where she balanced her university studies with her early years of training in the agency's foreign books department. In 2000, she became the head of that foreign department, which represents foreign publishers and agencies (primarily from the United States and the United Kingdom) for Spain, Latin America, and Portugal. After a brief two-year stint outside the agency, she returned in 2017—at the request of Luis Miguel Palomares, the son of Carmen Balcells and the current owner of the agency—to take on the role of literary director. Currently, in addition to her directorial responsibilities, she serves as the lead agent for both established authors and up-and-coming literary voices across all languages and formats. As a literary director, she has attended the most prominent book fairs in both Europe and America, and has participated in various roundtables on issues of relevance to the publishing sector.

Sergio Ramírez

(Masatepe, Nicaragua, 1942) graduated with a degree in Law in 1964. He founded the Ventana magazine in 1960, and led the literary movement of the same name. He was elected General Secretary of the Confederation of Central American Universities (CSUCA), based in Costa Rica, twice, in 1968 and in 1976. In 1968, he founded Editorial Universitaria Centroamericana (EDUCA). He founded the Nueva Nicaragua publishing house in 1981. Stripped of his Nicaraguan nationality in 2023, he lives in exile in Madrid. He is the chairman of the editorial board of the magazine Carátula, which he founded in 2006, and of the Festival Literario Centroamericana Cuenta, which he founded in 2012.

He has written more than sixty books, including novels, stories and essays, including: De tropeles y tropelías (1971, Premio Latinoamericano de Cuento of the magazine Imagen); ¿Te dio miedo la sangre? (1978, finalist of the Premio Latinoamericano Rómulo Gallegos, 1979); Castigo divino (1988, Dashiell Hammett Prize 1990); Un baile de máscaras (1995, 1998 Laure Bataillon Prize for best foreign book translated in France); Margarita, está linda la mar (1998, Premio Internacional de Novela Alfaguara 1998); La fugitiva (2011, International Metrópolis Bleu Festival Prize, Montreal). His cycle of noire novels is made up of El cielo llora por mí (2008), Ya nadie llora por mí (2017) and Tongolele no sabía bailar (2022). His latest storybook is Ese día cayó en domingo (2022) and his latest novel is El caballo dorado (Alfaguara, 2024). His books have been translated into twenty languages.

The awards he has received include Premio Iberoamericano de Letras José Donoso, 2011; Premio Carlos Fuentes a la Creación Literaria en Idioma Español, 2014; Premio Miguel de Cervantes, 2017; the Gold Medal of the Círculo de Bellas Artes of Madrid, 2021; the Premio del Festival Ñ, 2023, and the Premio del Festival Escribidores, 2024.

Other activities involving the participant:
The mystery of the imagination that creates (and destroys) worlds

Bernat Fiol

Invitado de Honor

Fiol was born in Mallorca in 1980. In 1998, he moved to Barcelona to study English Philology at the Universitat de Barcelona, and in 2001 he began working in the publishing sector as an intern at the literary agency Pontas. At the same time, he worked as a bookseller at the Espai Mallorca cultural center and bookstore, and occasionally collaborated with the press departments of several publishing houses. After working as a full-time agent at the literary agency Antonia Kerrigan, he founded SalmaiaLit in 2008. He is also a guest lecturer in the Master's on Publishing at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM).

http://www.facebook.com/SalmaiaLit

http://www.twitter.com/SalmaiaLit

https://www.instagram.com/salmaialit_ag/

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
Crossroads. Journalism and literature
European Literature Festival