The narrative festival Centroamérica Cuenta, promoted by the Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramírez, has become “a plane with two engines” in which authors can exchange with their readers to talk about their works and the environment in which they write, both face-to-face and virtual, its director highlighted this Wednesday.
The literary festival, chaired by Ramírez, after two years of being held virtually due to the covid-19 pandemic, will once again be face-to-face, this time in Guatemala, in its eighth edition, from May 26 to 29, he said. In a virtual interview with Efe, the director of Central America Account, the Nicaraguan Claudia Neira.
“As we say in Nicaragua, the third time is the charm. We are happy to be able to arrive in Guatemala after two failed attempts due to the pandemic”, in which it had to be celebrated virtually, he explained.
“Now we are happy to land in Guatemala with this small edition of the festival, which will last four days, and not seven” as is the tradition, he said.
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The eighth edition will be dedicated to the Spanish writer Almudena Grandes, will bring together three Alfaguara Awards and will present a new project “Cuenta Centroamérica”, stressed the director of Centroamérica Cuenta.
Second edition will be in Madrid
Neira said that one of the novelties in Guatemala is that the face-to-face will be complemented with the virtual.
“Now it is a plane that works with two engines, with two face-to-face editions: a first face-to-face edition in the first half of each year in a Central American country, and a second edition in the second half of the year in Madrid”, in addition to the virtual, he said.
The second edition of the festival will be from September 19 to 24 in Madrid, he announced.
Neira affirmed that during the two years in which they celebrated the literary festival virtually, due to the pandemic, they discovered that there was a void in the region in this type of event, so they decided to create “a virtual edition every month” through of their social networks, which has “allowed them to reach intimacy and reach millions of people”.
Now, he assured, “authors can exchange with readers, creators, journalists and the general public to talk about their books, their works, their work, and the environment in which they write.”
“We have to complement face-to-face with virtuality. That’s why we now have this two-stroke aircraft,” he noted.
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Chronicles: Central America Account
Likewise, Neira announced that in Guatemala they will present a new project, which they baptized as “Central American Basin”, which consists of writing a series of chronicles of the places where the literary festival will be held.
“Three authors are going to visit sites that have nothing to do with their work or anything to do with them and they are going to spend all day there to write a 1,500-word chronicle about their experience on that site,” he said.
The festival will also offer a workshop for 20 emerging writers (10 virtual and 10 face-to-face) on story writing and editing, which will be led by the Spanish editor Juan Casamayor and the Mexican editor Socorro Vanegas.
“The short story is one of the formats that is most used in Central America and it is one of the formats with which one begins to write before writing a novel,” he argued.
Centroamérica Cuenta, born from the ideology of Ramírez and the late Nicaraguan writer Ulises Juárez Polanco, will pay tribute to Almudena Grandes, born in Madrid in 1960 and who died last November, and who participated in previous editions of that literary festival.
The program of the event will include a table to remember his legacy and a film series with films adapted from his books, as well as a “visual tribute” with photos by Daniel Mordzinski, known as “the photographer of authors”.
Grandes is one of the most relevant writers of contemporary Spanish literature, winner of the National Narrative Award in 2018, author of novels such as “Las Ages de Lulú” or “Malena es un nombre de tango”, among other works.
According to the program, it will be a four-day agenda with 12 activities including conversations, book presentations and poetry readings, with the participation of writers, filmmakers, journalists, opinion leaders and artists from Latin America, as well as from the United States and France.
