Gabo Festival

English

21 Oct 2022 – 23 Oct 2022

Live

Description

Bogotá will host the Gabo Festival for the first time

  • This year, the Gabo Festival celebrates the 40th anniversary of Gabriel García Márquez winning the Nobel Priz
  • The 10th edition of the festival will be held from October 21 to 23, 2022.

The Gabo Festival, organized by the Gabo Foundation and created in 1995 by Gabriel García Márquez himself, is the largest event in Ibero-America dedicated to journalism, citizenship, and culture.

This year’s event is inspired by the speech La soledad de América Latina (The Solitude of Latin America), given by García Márquez in 1982 when he became the first and only Colombian to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. In one of his most famous quotes, he said: “Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all the creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.”

Little has changed 40 years later, immersed in this enormous reality, but we are no longer alone. In the 10th edition of this event, which is expected to spark a “spring of unsatiable creation,” Ibero-American storytellers, regardless of format, journalistic genre, or theme, come together to find new ways to tell and untangle the region’s story.

For this reason, meetings will revolve around journalism, literature, poetry, education, diversity, gender, creativity, and innovation. These themes will be explored in more than 50 activities including workshops, exhibitions, lectures, and meetings, bringing together 100 experts from Colombia and abroad.

This year’s winners of the Gabo Awards will be present among the participants, which will be announced in the coming weeks. This annual award aims to encourage the pursuit of excellence, innovation, and ethical consistency in journalism, inspired by Gabriel García Márquez’s ideals and work.

This time, the Festival will have a special emphasis on audiences, who are gaining center stage in the journalism and communications trades. Therefore, although the starting point for the event is journalism, Gabo, and stories, this edition seeks to involve all members of the public regardless of age.

This explains why Bogotá is hosting the core festival events at the Gimnasio Moderno, including other activities such as photography exhibitions, a wide variety of food, and concerts. The names of the participants and the schedule will be announced in the coming weeks.

The Gabo Awards and the Gabo Festival are made possible thanks to the partnership with the SURA and Bancolombia groups and their affiliates in Latin America.

What is the story behind the Nobel Prize and Bogotá?

Gabriel García Márquez first arrived in Bogotá in early 1943. This is where he began his studying a law degree at the Universidad Nacional, which he would never finish, and discovered the streetcar rides and cafés where poets, writers, and intellectuals would gather.

Eleven years later, he was hired by El Espectador, a newspaper where he wrote a column called “Día a Día” (“Day by Day”). He then polished his style and eventually became a renowned long-form journalist with texts such as La reina sola, in which he reiterates the theme of solitude and power, delving even deeper into these themes in El otoño del patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch), his fifth book.

Also, his first son, Rodrigo, was born in 1959. A year later, he became head of news at the Agencia Cubana de Prensa. In the 1990s, he used Bogotá as the setting for his last book, Noticia de un secuestro (News of a Kidnapping), and it became the place where he, along with other partners, acquired the magazine Cambio.

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