Bucaramanga Book Fair: everything ready for the start

About 200 national and foreign guests, among whom stand out Fernanda Trías (Uruguay), Benito Taibo (Mexico), Coral Herrera (Spain), Federico Kusko (Argentina), Patricio Guzmán (Chile) and Fernando Trueba (Spain), and the Colombians Pilar Quintana, Yolanda Reyes, Evelio Rosero, Melba Escobar, Pablo Montoya, Héctor Abad, Juan Gabriel Vásquez and Mario Mendoza, among others, will participate in version number 19 of the Bucaramanga Book Fair (Unilibro) that will begin on next August 30 and will end on September 5.

This year’s version is a tribute to literature and the different ways of narrating. “Literature calls and the fair is the space to present the stories that are born from the very experience of writers, poets and artists. The motto of this year’s fair is an invitation so that the general public does not lose the ability to astonish ourselves in front of literature, in front of art in front of the different ways of narrating, because it is the landscape, the cinema, the music, too they are read ”, says Yaneth Lizarazo Ortega, director of the Virtual Literature program, on the central theme of the Fair, Amazing Stories.

“It will be the reunion of books with their readers,” said Juan Camilo Montoya Bozzi, rector of the Autonomous University of Bucaramanga. Online sales, however, the cancellation of events such as book fairs impacted the industry negatively. That was one of the reasons why, explained the Rector, the decision was made to make the Ulibro 2021 sample in person. According to the Colombian Book Chamber, independent publishers tripled between 2019 and 2021: from 6,000 titles it went to 20,000.

The fair will be attended by, among others, the Santander History Academy, the Colombian Association of Historians, Red Mutis, as well as a photographic exhibition on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Armando Puyana Puyana and Alfonso Gómez Gómez, founders of the Institute. Caldas and the UNAB. “49 workshops for children, youth and specialized, have also been programmed, in remote mode”, reported Lynda Bula Barbosa, programming coordinator of Ulibro 2021.

This year the organization of Ulibro 2021 has put into the programming a ‘deck’ of authors who will talk about the corners of their writing and learn first-hand those ‘secrets’ that made it possible to realize their works.

The Barranquilla Giuseppe Caputo (1982), poet and writer, will engage in a dialogue with Olga Patricia Melo Barbosa, a doctor in Human and Social Sciences, about Estrella madre (Random House Literature), a novel that tells the story of a man who waits for his mother but with a particular ingredient: no one knows where he is or why he has left. Caputo has a degree in Creative Writing from New York University and the University of Iowa, and is the author of An Orphan World whose translation into English received an English Pen Award. Caputo was cultural director of the Bogotá International Book Fair (FILBo) between 2015 and 2018.

In this same strip of ‘Encounter with the author’ the Cesarean journalist Diana López Zuleta (1987) will talk with the doctor in Semiotics, Erika Zulay Moreno Bueno, about What did not erase the desert (Editorial Planeta), a book in which she unmasks to the author of the murder of her father, former councilor Luis López Peralta, when she was barely ten years old and with whom she won the CPB National Journalism Award for best book. López Zuleta is a specialist in Public Opinion and Political Marketing, he was a Colombian correspondent for Hispanopost. His journalistic works have been published in Miami’s Diario Las Américas, Semana magazine, and the Las 2 Orillas and La Nueva Prensa portals.

The emerging strategy and the death of the strategic plan, a book written, edited and published by Alejandro Salazar Yusti, a renowned consulting engineer in the business field, will be the subject of conversation with Juan Camilo Montoya Bozzi, MBA from American University and rector of the University Autonomous of Bucaramanga (UNAB). This is the first work by Salazar Yusti in which he shares his experience and his reflections on how to organize companies for profitable growth, breaking paradigms about the traditional ways of managing companies.

And the sexologist Flavia Dos Santos, born in Rio de Janeiro, will share the details of Desire: find it and live it fully (Without Borders), a book in which she analyzes real-life cases in which desire disappears, or abounds, with practical and simple tips to recognize how much we are enjoying this essential area. Flavia will be accompanied by Indira Rodríguez, a creator communicator of the Kunda La Vagina Foundation from where she works with women and girls for the resignification of their sexuality.

More guests

The Colombian writer recently awarded the 2021 Alfaguara Novel Prize, Pilar Quintana, for her work Los abismos (Alfaguara), will be at the University Services Center (CSU) of the Autonomous University of Bucaramanga (UNAB), talking about this story that According to Irene Vallejo, a member of the jury that has awarded him the important recognition, “between lucidity, innocence, suspense and the labyrinths of desire, he traces an unforgettable map of the heartbreaking path to freedom”.

Another laureate, the writer from Barrancabermeja (Santander), Pablo Montoya, will be speaking with the journalist and director of the newspaper Vanguardia, Diana Giraldo Mesa, on the opening day about her latest publication, La sombra de Orión (Random House), a novel that recounts the horror and indifference surrounding the state operation that recovered Commune 13 in Medellín with blood and fire.

Montoya (1963) won the Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize, in 2015, for his work Tríptico de la infamia. Before dedicating himself to literature, this professor at the University of Antioquia did four semesters of Medicine, a career he abandoned to study Music, Philosophy and Letters. He has a wide activity in literary production as he has performed in the novel, the short story and the poem, also the essay and literary criticism. Likewise, he has ventured into cultural chronicle and translation.

There will also be the 2020 National Novel Prize, Julio Paredes, Colombian writer, poet, novelist, teacher and philosopher who received this recognition from the Ministry of Culture for his book Aves inmóvil (Alfaguara), “a rare novel, not to say unique in literature written in the Spanish language. With impeccable writing, he introduces us to the universe of animal dissections and, at the same time, to the great malaise of contemporary man ”, Pablo Montoya precisely described in his criticism.

Julio Paredes (1957) has been a professor at the Universidad de los Andes and the Universidad Javeriana. He worked as a tutor in the Creative Writing Master of the National University of Colombia and in the creation program of the Central University. Between 2011 and 2013 he was editorial director of the Instituto Caro y Cuervo. From 2013 to date he is the General Editor of the Universidad de los Andes.

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