The LGTBQ+ friendship lobby
The LGBTQ+Ñ festival resumes with an afternoon panel at Los Angeles City College on the theme of the LGBTQ+Ñ lobby, which is the title of the event, with the participation of Boris Izaguirre and Pablo Simonetti.
Boris Izaguirre, writer (Caracas, Venezuela, 1965). His name has been part of Spanish-language literature and television for more than three decades. He has written scripts for historical soap operas such as La dama de rosa (Venezuela, 1986) and has been a collaborator and scriptwriter for television programmes such as Crónicas Marcianas (Spain, 1997-2005). Presenter of Prodigios (Spain, 2018, 2019, 2021) and Lazos de Sangre (Spain, 2018-2020), he received the Joan Ramón Mainat award for his career at the FesTVal de Vitoria in 2020.
Since 2011, he has published a weekly column in the newspaper El País entitled ‘La paradoja y el estilo’. Since 2017, he has also published a column every Sunday in El Nuevo Herald of Miami entitled ‘600 words’.
In 2007, his novel Villa Diamante was a finalist for the Planeta Prize and was very well received by readers. His other novels include Un jardín al norte, Dos monstruos juntos, Y de repente fue ayer, 1965, Azul petróleo and El vuelo de los ostriches. He is also the author of the essays Morir de glamour, Verdades alteradas, Fetiche and El armario secreto de Hitchcock. Tiempo de tormentas, published in 2018, is his latest novel.
Pablo Simonetti, writer (Santiago de Chile, 1961). An engineer by profession, he has been writing short stories and novels since 1996. In 1999 he published Vidas vulnerables (Vulnerable Lives), which received a special mention in the Santiago de Chile Municipal Literature Prize. In 2004, he published Madre que estás en los cielos (Mother in Heaven), a novel that was widely acclaimed in Chile and throughout Latin America, both by the public and by critics, and translated into several languages. This was followed by La razón de los amantes (2007), La barrera del pudor (2009) and La soberbia juventud (2013). In 2014, she published the short novel Garden, which was made into a play by Emilia and Héctor Noguera in 2016. His two most recent novels are Desastres naturales (2017) and Los hombres que no fui (2021). For eleven years he has directed the prestigious ‘Workshop for Future Writers’, sponsored by the Finis Terrae University. He is founder, former president and current board member of Fundación Iguales, an NGO dedicated to advancing the rights of LGBTIQ+ people.