For the sixth consecutive year, this global gathering will take place across five continents in a single week. In-person and digital activities will bring together more than one hundred authors in twelve cities within the Cervantes network, along with three guest cities from Latin America. It offers a snapshot of some of the most outstanding voices in Spanish-language literature. This year’s central theme will be libraries. The metaphor by Jorge Luis Borges—of existence and life as the space of a library—will serve as the starting point for a reflection on memory, books, imagination, and the multiplicity of themes encompassed by literature.
Benengeli is, above all, a space for literary conversation designed to foster dialogue between writers and readers. This edition will explore the role of libraries both in authors’ personal lives and in their creative processes, examining how these spaces of knowledge shape literary imagination.
For the second time, the Instituto Cervantes of Chicago will take part in this initiative, led by the Instituto Cervantes headquarters, joining this international network of literary encounters. On this occasion, participants will include Bolivian writer Giovanna Rivero, whose work deeply explores issues of identity, memory, and social bonds in contemporary literature, and Peter Elmore, a scholar and novelist with extensive experience in comparative literature and Latin American narrative. Lorena Uribe will be our moderator.
Giovanna Rivero (Bolivia) is a writer of short stories and novels. She is an Assistant Professor of Spanish Creative Writing and Literature in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa. Rivero will speak about spurious libraries. The home library is the most intimate space for the construction of an inner utopia. Like the garden or the childhood patio, the library becomes a homeland to which we return when everything else falls apart. Often, due to economic hardship or sociocultural circumstances, a library does not physically exist in a home or within a family—but a single book, even if borrowed, can take its place and become an unforgettable refuge.
Peter Elmore (Lima, 1960) is a Peruvian novelist, essayist, playwright, literary critical and professor. Elmore will talk about “The Enclosure of Books.” Jorge Luis Borges wrote that his father’s library had been “the central fact of his life,” and that he had never left it, “just as Alonso Quijano never left his own.” Borges’s library and that of the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance are personal libraries: intimate spaces inhabited by books chosen according to a reader’s sensibility and taste, places where one can enjoy reading in solitude and silence. Accumulating books at home is not the same as building a library and being shaped by it. Drawing on several examples, including those of Borges and Alonso Quijano, I will focus on the profile—moral, aesthetic, existential, but also social and economic—that defines a certain kind of reader: one who possesses (and is possessed by) a library.
Lorena Uribe Bracho is Assistant Professor in the Humanities Department at Wilbur Wright College, City Colleges of Chicago. Her research focuses on 16th- and 17th-century poetry, with an emphasis on music and sound, affect, embodiment, and lyric theory. She is currently working on a book project provisionally titled Pregnant Words, which explores the generative energy of verse in relation to early modern anatomical works and midwifery treatises.