The Hay Festival Querétaro is a cultural and ideas festival for all audiences that celebrates the arts and sciences through inclusive, accessible and playful events. Its programming includes talks, workshops, concerts and readings with international experts in the fields of literature, visual arts, science, the environment, cinema, music, human rights, journalism, among other topics.
For this eighth edition of the Festival, AC/E supports the participation in different programmed activities of the writers and experts:
María Medem was born in Seville in 1974. An artist trained in Fine Arts, in Seville. She is a painter, illustrator and cartoonist, whose early works were published in self-published releases and abroad (with Dutch publisher Terry Bleu). Her style, although it seems to start from the classic Moebius, finds its base in Japanese authors such as Katsushika Hokusai or Ikko Tanaka, and mainly seeks to create a landscape of estrangement, usually with water as a common element, wanting to represent frustration and loneliness. She has done illustrations for media like the New Yorker and the New York Times, or for production companies like A24. She has also made animations for musicians like Rival Consoles or Hermanos Gutiérrez. Her first graphic novel, Cenit de ella (Apa Apa Cómics) won all the major prizes she was eligible for: Best New Author at Barcelona Comic and the ACDCómic Award. Five years later, she published Por culpa de una flor (Apa Apa Cómics / Blackie Books), a profound poetic reflection on the individual and his current role in society.
Aroa Moreno Durán (Madrid, 1981). Spanish writer and journalist. She studied Journalism at the Complutense University of Madrid, specializing in International Information and Southern Countries. In the literary area, she has published the collections of poems Twenty years without new pencils (2009) and Jet lag (2016) and the biographies Frida Kahlo: viva la vida, and Federico García Lorca: la valiente alegría, both in Difusión publishing house (2011). She published her first novel in 2017, La hija del communista, with which she won the Ojo Crítico Narrative Award from RNE. In 2022 he returns to the literary scene with the novel La bajamar, in which he covers one hundred years of our history of three generations of women from the same family, and thus builds a story about gender, class, the Civil War and the conflicts of the Basque people throughout the 20th century.
Irene Solà (Malla, 1990) has a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona and a Master's Degree in Literature, Cinema and Visual Culture from the University of Sussex. His second novel, Canto yo y la montaña baila, published by Anagrama in Catalan and Spanish, won in 2019 the Llibres Anagrama prize for novels, the European Union Prize for Literature, the Punt de Llibre de Núvol prize, the Cálamo Otra Mirada prize and the Maria Àngels Anglada Narrative Prize, and has been translated into fifteen other languages, including English, French, Dutch, Turkish and Arabic. Ella Bèstia's book of poems (Galerada, 2012) received the Amadeu Oller Poetry Award and has been translated into English, Italian and will soon appear in Spanish. His first novel, Los diques, published in Catalan by L'Altra Editorial, won the 2017 Documenta Award. He regularly collaborates with La Vanguardia.ria, but rather delves into and deepens the tragic experience of exile, uprooting and desperate search for a better future that never comes.
