More than two decades behind it bringing together writers and other associations linked to culture and ideas credit this international literary festival, which this Thursday started a new edition in Segovia.
These days it opens in Segovia a British miracle that triumphs in Spanish, the Hay Festival. It brings together authors from all over, Anglo-Saxon, Latin American, Spanish, from other literary roots… Their activities, which do not stop on the days in which they are scheduled, are also attended by people from all over who, in addition, and this is unusual in the history of the relationship between readers and literary celebrations, pay to listen to the writers and the different participants in the different parts of this now legendary festival. Writers, but also politicians, artists from other disciplines, protagonists of international public life. But especially writers.
Years ago people went to Segovia for its museums, its aqueduct, its climate, and also for its legendary gastronomy. For more than twenty years people have also been going there, above all, for the Hay, an entity that in 2020 won the Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities.
It’s a British miracle that was born 36 years ago in Wales, promoted by Peter Florence and now directed, in the inaugural area and in different Latin American venues of the Hay, by a Madrid native with Canarian roots, Cristina Fuentes La Roche. This Hay that the British invented to bring together authors from all over the worldbut especially to the Anglo-Saxons, also works in Segovia, directed in this case by Sheila Cremaschi (Argentina de Neuquen), whose annual festival is underway since this Thursday. We have spoken with the two of them so that they can delve into the reasons for their success.
The idea that started it was, precisely, to get people to discuss ideas. Soon it was also a showcase for literary dissemination (and discussion). Cristina Fuentes says that that model born in Wales was soon very attractive to Latin American literati, so a path was born to which Segovia joined, the festival now underway when it just ended, in Mexicowhich annually also takes place in Queretaro. Soon it will be the one celebrated annually in Cartagena de Indias (Colombia), and in the portfolio is the one organized in Arequipathe Peruvian homeland of Mario Vargas Llosa.
It is not a circus that sets up its business wherever it opens, because together with these initiatives located in different places in the three worlds, the Spanish and the Latin American and the Hispanic, The Hay has created foundations and has implemented synergies that have ensured that it is not, in any of its headquarters, a foreign initiative but a purely local one.. In this way, everywhere, says Cristina Fuentes, it has to do with the roots, the literature and the thought of the place in which it is carried out. “Each place has a different model.” It is not the consequence of a selection of novelties, but is in each place the result of a cultural, literary program, which takes its model from the Anglo-Saxon root of the events.
It was the Mexican Carlos Fuentes the one who suggested to them that in Latin America Cartagena de Indias, where his friend Gabriel García Márquez lived, was the right place to begin Hay’s Latin American transplant. “He was already a regular at the Welsh festival, and he was right: Cartagena is the most beautiful city in the Caribbean Sea, in a country that then, and always, has needed these conversations.” And in 2006 the British Hay was already Caribbean.
Hay’s journey continued in Segovia. Twenty years ago the proposal came to Cremaschi to start it, and he is still so enthusiastic. It was impossible to imagine in Spain, or in America, anyone paying to attend a literary dialogue, something that is practiced without hesitation in the Anglo-Saxon world. That miracle also occurred in the Castilian capital. “It wasn’t difficult, and it seemed impossible,” says Sheila.
She attributes the rapid implementation of the idea to the push she found in the then mayor Clara Lucero. They agreed, and who thought that was possible, the Popular Party and the Socialist Party: both believed that it was a good project for Segovia. “The festivals in Wales and Cartagena had already been filmed; “Doing it here represented an effort that had a good experience.”
They began, says Cremaschi, with an unusual strength then, and also enviable now. There were, along with the Spanish and Latin American authors, as is natural at these festivals, personalities of the magnitude of Martin Amis and the Nobel Doris Lessing… It was a success, it is still a success. I ask him about the reasons for the miracle. Like Cristina Fuentes, she thinks that this opportunity to bring together authors from the English shore and the Hispanic shore was unusual, and now it is everyday, and that is why people come, “because listening to what is said is worth it, it is attractive.” .
Regarding the mixture of languages and cultures, of books and origins, “the Colombian Laura Restrepo warned me as soon as I started here. He told me that the Spanish and Hispanic Americans knew the English authors better, and they knew very little about these Latin American colleagues.”. That distance has been shortened. And the Segovia edition is a major symptom of this consequence of british miracle What does Hay mean?
These days there are bigger names, well known or yet to be known. Some identities so you know what you can find in the old aqueduct capital: Andrea Marcolongo, Martha Robles, Felix Valdivieso, Jesse Norman (in conversation with Martin Ivens), Carlos Franganillo (in conversation with Diego Alcazar), Rosa Montero (with Myriam Chirousse and Isabelle Bereneronand in another conversation with the editor Ana Gavin), Ray Loriga (with Carlos Zanon and Luis Alemany), John Maeda (an artificial intelligence genius), Juan Carlos Galindo (born in Segovia, whose novel Hontoria has its roots in this land, with Berna González Harbor), Javier Cercas (with Vicente Valles) either Fernando Trueba with Javier Mariscal (in conversation with Pepa Blanes), among many others.
Going to Segovia was always a major attraction in life. For twenty years, as in Wales, as in Latin America, this trip here has had great literary appeal that, thanks to the English miracle, is now also enjoyed by paying.