Brenda Navarro

She was part of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 2023. Her debut novel, Casas vacías (2018), won the Premio Tigre Juan and the Pen Translation Award in the United Kingdom. Her second novel, Ceniza en la boca (2022), received the Premio Cálamo, the Premio de la Asociación de Librerías de Madrid, the Premio Todos tus Libros, and the Premio San Clemente as the best book of 2022, in addition to being a finalist at the Bienal Vargas Llosa 2022.

She has worked as an editor and screenwriter and teaches creative writing workshops both nationally and internationally, including at the City University of New York (CUNY), New York University (NYU), the University of Iowa (UI), and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She has been invited to give lectures at Harvard, Brown, Wesleyan, Iowa, and New York universities. Additionally, she has contributed to media outlets such as El País, Pikara Magazine, La Marea, El Salto, Milenio, Tierra Adentro, among others.

In 2021, she served as the General Coordinator for the diploma course Encuentros y Desencuentros de la lengua española y de las literaturas hispánicas, organized by the Cátedra Extraordinaria Carlos Fuentes de Literatura Hispanoamericana and the Centro de Estudios Mexicanos en España (CEM-España). This course brought together over two dozen Ibero-American speakers to discuss Spanish-language literature. She also coordinated the project “No hay lugar en este país” (2021) with the Centro de Análisis e Investigación Fundar México, which included a literary workshop that resulted in the publication of a book in 2022.

Other activities involving the participant:

One-way trip from nowhere
A one-way ticket

Pau Luque

Invitado de Honor

Born in Barcelona in 1982, he has lived in Mexico City since 2014. He trained as a legal philosopher at the University of Genoa (Italy) and as a humanist at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona (Spain). In 2020, he published Las cosas como son y otras fantasías (Anagrama Argumentos), a literary essay offering a way out of the deadlock that has constrained the relationship between art and morality in the 21st century. He argues that neither superficial moralism, which demands art to be correct, nor the moral indifference promoted by a misunderstood liberalism captures the essence of ethics or its relation to artistic impulse. Luque suggests that imperfect moral virtues, literary or narrative imagination, and worldly vicissitudes are the ethical sources from which any work with something human to say draws.

In collaboration with Natalia Carrillo, he published Hipocondría moral (Nuevos cuadernos Anagrama) in 2022, where they identify a strange but omnipresent contemporary phenomenon: we feel guilt when we are guilty, but especially when we are not. In this essay, they critique the contemporary choice (or imposition) of guilt as the primary emotion structuring our relationship with the world's calamities. They propose that it would be much more fruitful politically, morally, and even philosophically to replace guilt with responsibility.

With Ñu (Anagrama Narrativas hispánicas), published in 2024, Luque gives a new twist to genre hybridization, inventing the essay with characters. Real and fictional creatures wander and converse in Ñu about their lives, their ideas, love and friendship, and the unsettling possibility that what we call "solution" might be nothing more than an inevitable fantasy.

Other activities involving the participant:

On literature in other formats. A crossroads. Ethics and literature Punzadas Sonoras (Podcast. Live episode)

Camilo Hoyos Gómez

Director of Paredro, Center for the Promotion of Reading, Writing, and Orality, host and director of Paredro Podcast, the podcast about books, authors, and other figures in the literary world. He holds a PhD in Humanities from Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, 2010, Spain) and a degree in Literature from Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia). He has taught at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Universidad de los Andes, Universidad Javeriana, and Instituto Caro y Cuervo in Bogotá, among others. He is a founding member of the Fundación Gratitud. He served as Academic Deputy Director of Instituto Caro y Cuervo from 2014 to 2016, an advanced studies center affiliated with the Ministry of Culture of Colombia.

Other activities involving the participant:

Workshop 2: Paredro Podcast and the construction of reading communities