This January, the classic British festival Hay Festival celebrates 21 years since it first landed in Colombia, the first of several Latin American countries, along with Peru and Mexico, where each year brings together artists and thinkers who lead public conversations in the region and around the world. For 2026, from January 22 to February 5, the festival already has the main course ready: 180 people will travel to Colombia to participate in 140 events in Cartagena, another 40 in the municipality of Jericó, 11 in the country city of Medellín and 5 in Barranquilla. The inaugural event will be held with the participation of Diego Luna, Mexican actor, director and producer. Shortly afterwards, the leader of the Venezuelan opposition, Maria Corina Machado, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, will also speak. And among other special dishes, the legendary Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodriguez will also be present, who at 78 years old has been touring Latin America, and hopes to present his new book: Silvio Rodríguez, diary of a troubadour.
Literature, as usual, is allowed at the festival. The Argentine Hernán Díaz, winner of the Pulitzer Prize a few years ago for his novel Fortunewill talk about its adaptation to the HBO platform. Philippe Sands will also present his latest book, 38 London Streetabout dictator Augusto Pinochet’s relationship with an officer of Nazi Germany. There will be no shortage of well-known faces, such as the Spanish Javier Cercas, the Cuban Leonardo Padura, and other locals such as Pilar Quintana, Evelio Rosero, Laura Restrepo and Hector Abad Faciolince.
EL PAÍS will have a special chair in this year’s edition to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. Director Jan Martinez Ahrens will speak in a meeting on the situation of journalism with Mexican journalist Denise Maerker; by the Nicaraguan Carlos Fernando Chamorro, and moderated by the Colombian journalist and collaborator of this newspaper Diana Calderón. Furthermore, the former director and current director of the EL PAÍS School, Javier Moreno, will speak with three of the newspaper’s most emblematic Latin American columnists: Leila Guerriero, Leonardo Padura and Juan Gabriel Vásquez, who will present This happened, a book with a selection of articles published in EL PAÍS.
The Hay has also put itself forward to voices seeking answers about the future and in that future there is undoubtedly the growing power of Artificial Intelligence. Journalist Karen Hao will then travel to Colombia, taking her with her best seller which analyzes one of the fathers of this technology: The empire of artificial intelligence. Sam Altman and his quest for world domination. Also present with her will be the Spanish philosopher Carissa Véliz, professor of the department of ethics and artificial intelligence at the University of Oxford. Fear of climate change and nuclear energy also has a place in these conversations about the uncertain future. The Colombian biologist Brigitte Baptiste, for example, will present her latest book on transecology, and the North American journalist Annie Jacobsen her work Nuclear war: a scenario.
“These are times marked by uncertainty and the search for new paradigms,” said event director Cristina Fuentes when announcing the event. He also highlighted the presence of the Mozambican writer Mía Couto, the Albanian academic Lea Ypi and the Egyptian journalist Omar El Akkad who will present his latest book, One day, everyone will always be against thiswhich concerns the Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip. “We don’t want the festival to be held only with northern voices,” he stressed. There will be voices on the risks faced by democracy, on the role of literature in the face of technological progress, but also the voice of Cuba’s most famous singer-songwriter together with the local salsa group La Pambelé.
