Valentín Roma

Invitado de Honor

Writer born in 1970 in a family of workers who emigrated from La Mancha to the industrial periphery of Barcelona.

His trilogy on social class mobility in Spain during the 1980s and 1990s, published by Periférica (Cáceres), includes the following novels: El enfermero de Lenin (2017), about the relationship between a son in the midst of an ideological crisis and a father who believes himself to be Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov; Retrato del futbolista adolescente (2019), which recounts the period when the author was a promising professional soccer player, and El capitalista simbólico (2022), about a writer for the Michelin Green Guide who disrupts the peaceful lives of Madrid and Catalonia’s oligarchies.

He has also written the essays Rostros (2011, Periférica) and Diecinueve apagones y un destello (Arcadia, 2020).

With a PhD in Philosophy from Southampton University, Winchester School of Art, since 2016 he has directed La Virreina Centro de la Imagen (Barcelona), where he has curated numerous exhibitions on authors such as Susan Sontag, John Berger, Marguerite Duras, August Sander, Barbara Hammer, and Alexander Kluge, and others.

In 2025, he will publish Los trillizos, also with Periférica, which tells the story of a middle-aged man and his new family, consisting of an African mother and her three young children. This book reflects on class conflicts, labor discipline issues, and the desire to break free from the ideologies that, unwittingly, shape us. These themes, along with humor and the right to resentment, run through the novelist’s work.

Anna Pacheco

Invitado de Honor

(Barcelona, 1991) is a writer and journalist specializing in social issues, work, feminism and popular culture with a class and gender perspective. She has a Master's Degree in Social Anthropology from the University of Barcelona (UB). She co-hosts the podcast “Ciberlocutorio” on Radio Primavera Sound. She is a freelancer and has collaborated with various media, such as El País, El Salto, El Diario, La Marea and on the “Carne Cruda” and “Planta Baixa” programs on Televisió de Catalunya (TV3). Her journalism pieces stand out for their markedly immersive and investigative character, and for their literary tone.

She has featured in various fiction and non-fiction anthologies such as Aquí estamos.Puzzle de un momento feminista (2019, Akal) and Allí donde nos encontramos (2021, Temas de Hoy), among other compilations. She is the author of the novel Listas, guapas, limpias (2019, Caballo de Troya) and has published Estuve aquí y me acordé de nosotros (2024, Anagrama), an ethnographic essay on tourism and work in luxury hotels in Barcelona.

Elena Medel

Invitado de Honor

(Córdoba, 1985) has published the poetry books Mi primer bikini (DVD, 2002; translated into English and Swedish), Tara (DVD, 2006) and Chatterton (Viewer, 2014), combined in Un día negro en una casa de mentira (Visor, 2015); the essays El mundo mago (Ariel, 2015), Todo lo que hay que saber sobre poesía (Ariel, 2018) and Erudición sobre hormigas y rositas (CSIC, 2023), y la novela Wonders: a novel (Anagrama, 2020), translated into fifteen languages and winner of the Premio Francisco Umbral al Libro del Año 2020 and longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award 2023.

Her other awards include the XXVI Premio Loewe a la Creación Joven and the Leonardo 2021 grant from Fundación BBVA. She has been a writer-in-residence at the Cheuse International Writers Center, the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA) and the Arvo Pärt Centre. She runs the La Bella Varsovia poetry publisher and lives in Madrid.

Winston Manrique Sabogal

He is a Colombian-Spanish journalist and founder and director of WMagazín, a global digital literary and cultural magazine based in Spain. His vocation is pan-Hispanic and itinerant, participating in the leading fairs and gatherings of writers and the book universe in both America and Europe. This pioneering project caters to a dual, analog, and virtual world, featuring special editions in PDF and print that enrich journalistic genres and explore new narratives through individual and group video interviews, photo stories, video stories, and video chats with both established and emerging authors, as well as professionals in the field.

He collaborates with the Spanish newspaper El País, where he worked for 19 years as an editor and head of books and literature for the Babelia supplement and the Culture section, and was co-editor of its digital edition and the blog Papeles perdidos. He has interviewed leading writers and book professionals from around the world over the past few decades and has written reports on literary creation, the publishing industry, and the promotion of reading. From this work came the titles El destino del libro, Latinoamérica contra los tópicos and Historias del Boom.50 años de la literatura que cambió el español (El País-Amazon).

In Colombia, he worked for the newspapers El Espectador and El Tiempo, the Colombian news agency Colprensa (Research Unit), and the radio newspaper Agrohuila. He reported on issues ranging from the coffee crisis and alliances between paramilitary and religious sects, to social and cultural trends.

He is the author of La gran transformación: la belleza, el amor, el sexo y la felicidad en el siglo XXI (Galaxia Gutenberg), a work that analyzes the accelerated metamorphosis of these four great desires that are changing life. Over two hundred people, from writers and artists to philosophers and sociologists, have contributed to his journalistic articles since the 1990s.

Other activities involving the participant:

"Childness" Landscape in motion
The "other people": animals and nature in literature
Paths in time
Crossroads. Journalism and literature
European Literature Festival
Two-way journeys of literary agents And a tribute to Antonia Kerrigan