In the heart of the Festival, the bookstore. Big hands. Small hands. Experienced hands. Do you have this book? Do you have that other one?
This is how the people of Paracatu welcome the 2nd edition of the Paracatu International Literary Festival. With the theme “Love, literature and diversity”, the event brings together 63 national and international authors. The program includes names such as Conceição Evaristo, Itamar Vieira Júnior, Jeferson Tenório, Edney Silvestre, Igiaba Scego. The honorees will be Ailton Krenak and the poet Lucas Guimaraens. Local authors will also launch their books during the event, which has an intense program that will run from Wednesday (28) until Sunday.
The bookstore – set up especially for the event – is one of the highlights. The city in Minas Gerais, which is 500 kilometers from the capital, Belo Horizonte, does not have one. The public library and the internet are the options for those who live in the city.
“The children pick it up, feel it, and see how many pages the book has,” says Priscila Faria, a nutritionist who visits the space with her daughters. For her, once a year is not enough.
This feeling is shared by teacher Denilva Souza Dias. For her, the bookstore is “the best of everything”. Denilva introduces the books from the school library to the students. A reader of romance novels, the teacher believes that the Festival can help create the habit of reading among the city’s residents. To do this, in her opinion, it needs to be better publicized and have books at more affordable prices. “Those who don’t read won’t buy cheap books, much less expensive ones”, she believes.
For Afonso Borges, creator and president of Fliparacatu, the appreciation for the bookstore comes from the fact that the book is “the center of everything, a perennial asset that lasts forever”.
“The book is present, it has its own autonomy, it has its own story. Each person who reads a book recreates that story based on their own experience. So the legacy that remains is personal experiences,” he says.
Borges says that this year’s panels will not have a set theme. The idea is to have the authors sit down and talk about what is in their hearts. In addition, they will talk about the magic of each one’s literary creation and the authors’ connection with the city of Paracatu.
This city, Afonso Borges continues, has the tradition of Afonso Arinos, author of “Pelo sertão”, a collection of short stories that would have founded Brazilian regional literature, published in 1898.
“Paracatu has the tradition of Afonso Arinos, a central figure and founder of Brazilian regional literature. Revered by Guimarães Rosa, Graciliano Ramos, Euclides da Cunha, Mário de Andrade… and forgotten, hidden, in Brazilian literature. I think that, for this reason alone, it is worth holding a literary festival here in Paracatu”, says Borges.
At the opening table, Afonso recalled the first edition, which brought together 24,000 people. Ana Cunha, Director of Government Relations and Social Responsibility at Kinross, sponsor of the Festival, through the Rouanet Law of the Ministry of Culture, recalled that culture also has a transformative power in the economy, generating jobs and development.
The Literary Festival also includes a children’s and youth program, workshops, a creative economy square with local entrepreneurs, exhibitions and a Drawing and Writing Award, which mobilized students from the Paracatu school system. The program is free and spread across 10 points in the city’s historic center.
* The reporter traveled at the invitation of the mining company Kinross
