Santiago de Querétaro will be this week an open window to the world and its affairs, an amalgam of punk, poetry, political (and artistic) activism, gatherings and drinks among a handful of the privileged minds of our century, who from time to time meet in the same place. It’s the fault of the Hay Festival 2024which returns to the colonial center of the city to host for the ninth time the international meeting of writers, activists, musicians, scientists, journalists and other intellectuals from around the world: 22 countries that make up, according to the organizers, the most diverse edition to date.
From this Thursday to Sunday, Querétaro will host almost a hundred cultural events in different venues such as the Teatro de la Ciudad, the Cineteca Rosalío Solano or the Jardín Guerrero. The 9th edition will be inaugurated by the French writer based in Mexico Neige Sinno, author of sad tiger (Anagram), one of the great publishing revelations of last year, a raw novel about sexual abuse against boys and girls, in conversation with the journalist Elvira Liceaga; it will be closed by a “performance “Artistic and disruptive” by Guz Guevara, musician and anti-capitalist activist, focused on the rights of people with disabilities and the LGBTTTIQ+ community (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transvestite, Transgender, Transsexual, Intersexual and Queer).
War and poverty will be paradoxically present through two Nobel Peace Prize winners: the Ukrainian Oleksandra Matviichuk (in 2022) and the Indian Kailash Satyarthi. Matviichuk won the prestigious award in 2022 together with the Russian human rights organization Memorial and the imprisoned Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatski. Director of the Center for Civil Libertiessince Vladimir Putin decided to invade his native country in February 2022, his life has been a mission: to document the war crimes of the Russian Army in order to, one day, see Putin sitting before an international tribunal. Satyarthi left his job as an electrical engineer in the 1980s and since then focused his life on the fight against child exploitation. In 2014, he received the Nobel Prize together with Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager who at the age of 14 committed the mortal sin of wanting girls to go to school and received her punishment in the form of a bullet to the head, fired by the Taliban, from which she survived by some kind of atheistic miracle.
Not only the war in Ukraine. Israel’s offensive on Gaza, denounced by South Africa at the UN International Court of Justice The Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish, a Palestinian in the diaspora, journalist and literary critic, will be in Querétaro. Darwish is one of the great Arab writers of recent years and, since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023 and the Jewish State responded with excessive force, which has already killed more than 40,000 inhabitants of the Strip, he has also become the involuntary ambassador of his country, forced by circumstances to be the voice of the victims.
From Palestine to Chile with Raúl Zurita, excessive and brilliant, considered by many critics as the best living Spanish-speaking poet. And from the Southern Cone, too, the journalist Leila Guerriero, who will present The Call (Anagram2024), her latest book, a brutal chronicle of the Argentine dictatorship, the disappeared, the politically repressed and the searching mothers through the story of Silvia Labayru, a participant in the armed struggle, kidnapped by the military, tortured, enslaved, raped, a survivor and branded a traitor by her former companions.
The filth and fury (or what’s left of it) of the Sex Pistols will also land in Querétaro, thanks to Glen Matlock, founding member of the original punk band that shook up the British status quo at the end of the 1970s. Many years after the adventures of that short-lived group with an extensive epitaph, Matlock, composer of most of their great hymns, continues making music solo and as a member of the also legendary Blondie, but at the same time, he has been a member of the band since 1970. Hay Festival He arrives with a book under his arm, his memoirs: Triggers: A Life in Music (Nine Eight Books), published this year and still without translation into Spanish.
The remaining list of participants and events is long and unfathomable. From the new revelation of Spanish literature, Sara Barquinero, to the Frenchman Patrick Autréaux, the Mexicans Emiliano Monge and Frida Cartas, the music of Lila Downs and Colin Greenwood (bassist of Radiohead), the scientific gaze of physicist Julieta Fierro and neurosurgeon Henry Marsh, the linguist Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil or a tribute to the great Mexican poet David Huerta. Querétaro awaits.
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