Victoria Szpunberg

Invitado de Honor

Victoria Szpunberg is a playwright, director and dramaturgy teacher. She was invited to the Royal Court Theatre International Residency in 2000 with her first play.
Since then, her works have premièred at numerous national and international festivals and theatres. Her plays have been translated into more than ten languages. Alongside her career as a writer, she has partnered with various choreographers, developed dramaturgies, directed and adapted plays and written pieces for radio and sound installations. She has also taken part in theatre and education projects. In 2013, she received the Max Prize for Catalan Playwriting. In 2019, she was playwright-in-residence at Sala Beckett with the play Amor mundi (Festival Grec 2019) and won the VII SGAE Laboratory Fellowship to write Tu hija (Your Daughter). In 2022, she premièred the opera libretto La gata perduda (The Lost Cat) (Gran Teatro del Liceo, winner of the Serra d’Or Prize, Max Prize, Teatre Barcelona Prize, among others), and that same year also premièred El peso de un cuerpo (The Weight of a Body) (TNC and CDN). In 2023, she premièred her play Mal de coraçon (Heartache) (Cia Solitària, TNC), and in 2024 L’imperatiu categòric (The Categorical Imperative) (Teatre Lliure 2024–2025), a work that received the City of Barcelona Prize, the Butaca Prize, the Time Out Award for Best Creator of the Year and the Critics’ Prize for Best Text, among others. This year she has premièred Vulcano (Volcano) (CDN) and La tercera fuga (The Third Escape) (Sala Gran, TNC).

Other activities involving the participant:

Barcelona today: a transformation
Barcelona opens the curtain!

Jordi Soler

Jordi Soler was born in 1963 in La Portuguesa, Veracruz, Mexico. He is the author of two poetry collections and a dozen narrative works, which have been translated into several languages. He now lives in Barcelona, the city his family once fled after the Spanish Civil War. He is a knight of the Irish Order of the Finnegans. His works include Bocafloja (Loose Mouth), La mujer que tenía los pies feos (The Woman Who Had Ugly Feet), Los rojos de ultramar (The Reds from Overseas), La última hora del último día (The Last Hour of the Last Day), Diles que son cadáveres (Tell Them They’re Corpses), La fiesta del oso (The Bear’s Festival), Ese príncipe que fui (The Prince I Was), El cuerpo eléctrico (The Electric Body), Usos rudimentarios de la selva (Rudimentary Uses of the Jungle), Los hijos del volcán (The Sons of the Volcano), En el reino del toro sagrado (In the Realm of the Sacred Bull) and Y uno se cree (And One Believes).

Paulina Flores

Paulina Flores (Santiago, Chile, 1988) es licenciada en Literatura Hispánica por la Universidad de Chile y tiene un máster en Escritura Creativa por la Universidad Pompeu Fabra de Barcelona. Su primer libro, un conjunto de nueve relatos publicados bajo el título Qué vergüenza (Hueders, Santiago, 2015; Seix Barral, Barcelona, 2016), fue traducido a múltiples idiomas y seleccionado como uno de los diez mejores libros por El País. La obra obtuvo el Premio Roberto Bolaño, el Premio del Círculo de Críticos, el Premio Municipal de Literatura y en 2019 el Bauer Giovanni, en Venecia.

Es autora también de la novela Isla Decepción (Seix Barral, 2021), con la que obtuvo el Premio LINC al mejor libro del año en la categoría de ficción, y fue traducida al inglés, japonés y holandés, entre otros idiomas. Ha sido profesora y conductora del podcast Confieso que he leído; realiza charlas y talleres sobre procesos creativos de escritura, y colabora como columnista en El País.

Other activities involving the participant:

Benvinguts: arriving in Barcelona
Bolaño's transatlantic heritage