Verónica Zondek

(Santiago de Chile, 1953)  

Latest books of poetry: Por gracia de hombre (2008); La ciudad que habito (2012); Instalaciones de la memoria (2013); Nomeolvides: Flores para nombrar la ignominia (2014); Sedimentos (2015);Cold fire (2016); Ojo de agua (2019); Hola ratón con cola (2022); El esplendor de la granada (2023); Manto azul (2024). Current translations:  Red Doc, by Anne Carson (2017); La Muerte de los Padres, by Anne Sexton (2018); Zumbido, by Emily Dickinson (2018); The World is Round, by Gertrude Stein (2020); Morgue and Other Poems, by Gottfried Benn (2021); This Great Unknowing, by Denise Levertov (2025).

Other activities involving the participant:

The Poetry Room
Gabriela Mistral: 80 years since the Nobel Prize

Maite Carranza

Invitado de Honor

Maite Carranza was born in Barcelona in 1958. She studied anthropology and worked as a teacher and TV screenwriter while also focusing on literature.
Her extensive career spans over 70 books many of them young adult novels, and her trilogy La Guerra de les Bruixes translated into over 30 languages (War of the Witches in English), has brought her international renown as well.
Her groundbreaking, socially engaged work – with titles such as Paraules emmetzinades (‘Poisoned words’) – has been recognised with several awards; including the Spanish National Children’s and Young Adult Literature Award, the Critics’ Award, the Cervantes Chico Award and the Edebé Award for Children’s and Young Adult Literature. This year, she was nominated for the 2026 Hans Christian Andersen Award, the most prestigious international children’s and young adult literature award, as well as for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award.
She combines literature with screenwriting, talks and lectures, and she strives to defend authors’ rights. She also contributed to the animated feature film L’Olívia i el terratrèmol invisible, based on her novel La pel·lícula de la vida. The Catalan film received an award at the Festival d’Annecy 2025 and will première this autumn.
 

Other activities involving the participant:

One Thousand Young People with Maite Carranza

Bruno Vieira Amaral

(Portugal, 1978)
Collaborator in the magazine Ler, the newspaper Expresso and Rádio Observador. He made his debut with the essay Guia para 50 Personagens da Ficção Portuguesa in 2013, published by Guerra e Paz. His first novel, As Primeiras Coisas (Quetzal, 2013), was awarded the PEN Clube Narrative Prize, the Fernando Namora Literary Prize, the Time Out and the José Saramago Literary Award in 2015. In 2016 he was selected as one of the Ten New Voices from Europe, by the platform Literature Across Frontiers.
His second novel, Hoje Estarás Comigo no Paraíso (Quetzal, 2017), received the 2016-2017 Tabula Rasa Prize in the fiction category, and took second place in the 2018 Oceans Prize. In 2018 his best scattered texts were gathered, in the volume Manobras de Guerrilha, and in 2020 he published the book of short stories Uma Ida ao Motel, awarded the following year with the Camilo Castelo Branco /APE Short Story Grand Prize. In 2021 he published Marginal Integrated, biography of the writer José Cardoso Pires. A year later, he met in O Segundo Coração a series of chronicles about the past and memory. In 2024 he published his third novel, Toda a Gente Tem um Plan . The rights to his books have been sold to several countries, including Spain, Italy, Brazil, Hungary, Egypt and Israel.

Other activities involving the participant:

The Everyday Life in the Periphery

Claudia Neira Bermúdez

She has been the director of the Central America Festival since 2015, where she also coordinates the content curation. She combines her cultural management work with her experience in strategic communication and public relations.
Previously, she worked as an editor in media in Nicaragua; as a communication expert in the United States and Nicaragua, where she founded, in 2005, Crea Comunicaciones.

She holds a master's degree in strategic communication and public relations at Marshall University, West Virginia, United States. She is a fellow from the V class of the Central American Leadership Initiative (CALI, associated with the Aspen Institute). She has been a mentor at Voces Vitales and has been part of various cultural, business and leadership initiatives in Central America.

Nicaraguan born in Brazil, to a Peruvian father and a Nicaraguan mother. Since 2022, she has lived in Madrid.

Other activities involving the participant:

Central America in Mexico, and Mexico in Central America: a literary round trip
Latin America Viva

Maite Carranza

Invitado de Honor

Maite Carranza was born in Barcelona in 1958. She studied anthropology and worked as a teacher and TV screenwriter while also focusing on literature.
Her extensive career spans over 70 books many of them young adult novels, and her trilogy La Guerra de les Bruixes translated into over 30 languages (War of the Witches in English), has brought her international renown as well.
Her groundbreaking, socially engaged work – with titles such as Paraules emmetzinades (‘Poisoned words’) – has been recognised with several awards; including the Spanish National Children’s and Young Adult Literature Award, the Critics’ Award, the Cervantes Chico Award and the Edebé Award for Children’s and Young Adult Literature. This year, she was nominated for the 2026 Hans Christian Andersen Award, the most prestigious international children’s and young adult literature award, as well as for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award.
She combines literature with screenwriting, talks and lectures, and she strives to defend authors’ rights. She also contributed to the animated feature film L’Olívia i el terratrèmol invisible, based on her novel La pel·lícula de la vida. The Catalan film received an award at the Festival d’Annecy 2025 and will première this autumn.
 

Other activities involving the participant:

The Pleasure of Reading Gala