We must publicly acknowledge the credit to Lola Cazalilla and Juan José Sandoval, burnishers of the new Cádiz Book Fair that will be held, covid by, from July 2 to 11, 2021. Despite not being done where I would like, in the squares of San Juan de Dios, Mina or San Antonio, the executive of José María González has opted for a first-class event that will try to stimulate the culture, literary at least, of the capital and the entire province. For this, the organization has had the help of the director of Sociocultural Actions of the Unicaja Foundation, Rafael Muñoz, the Andalusian Center for Letters (CAL) and the Ory Foundation, among other public and private entities.
There will be those who will protest that it is not a typically local fair, although among the writers present, the person in charge of the inaugural speech, the Juan Bonilla National Narrative Prize, will boast of Cadiz, the keen vigilante of chance that is Felipe Benítez Reyes or Wayne Jamison, who continues to discover swastikas in the south of Spain. But what difference does it make to them.
The organization exhibits a magnificent roster of writers that will surely attract hundreds (hopefully thousands) of curious and / or readers to the enclosure of the Cadiz Bastion. At the expense of reviewing the final program, people like Juan del Val, screenwriter for El Hormiguero and novelist, Pablo Gutiérrez, the wonderful columnist Manuel Jabois, the brilliant Marta Sanz, the always interesting Patricio Pron, Sergio del Molino, the fashion essayist, or the queen of the Spanish novel, María Dueñas, among many other authors.
It has been a long time since the main book fair in the province had a poster – by the way, the work of Ana Juan, a famous illustrator who has published in such diverse places as The New Yorker or Solidaritée, apart from collaborating with El País y el Mundo – so high and important. Some comparisons are always more obnoxious than others and the credit goes to who it is. There will be those who say that other recent fairs were more crappy or worse because of the money that was not had, but to take a party of literature with this brightness in full post? pandemic is to repeatedly and publicly congratulate those responsible.
A month ago I discovered that a new publishing house had sprung up in Cádiz -Firmamento, by Javier Vela and María Alcantarilla- and now I am enjoying a spectacular fair that only lacks those veteran booksellers who provide an unreachable cache. Culture, and in its interior, literature, remains strong in an enlightened and plural city that always looked towards America. Curiously, this ambitious literary event has been announced in the press on the same day that the plaque that the people of Cádiz gave to José María Pemán was removed, of whom Kichi said in his day that “it has been and will be indelibly one of the greatest representatives of Cádiz letters “.
– .
