After the opening ceremony at 10:30 am, by the Director of the Instituto Cervante in Los Angeles Luisgé Martín and the Dean of Los Angeles City College Juan F. Álvarez, the prestigious Los Angeles College hosts the opening day panels of this ambitious first edition of the LGBTQ+Ñ Festival, organised by the Instituto Cervanes with a relevant local partnership. The first panel, entitled El español, una lengua de machos, brings together writers Boris Izaguirre, Nando López and María Mínguez from 11am onwards.
The name Boris Izaguirre (Caracas, Venezuela, 1965) 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 avestruces. 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.
Novelist, playwright and doctor in Hispanic Philology Nando López (Barcelona, Spain, 1977) is the author of La edad de la ira, a long-seller that became an international hit series, and novels such as Los elegidos, Presente imperfecto and Hasta nunca, Peter Pan. Winner of the Gran Angular Award 2020 for La versión de Eric and the Arcoíris Award 2023, he is also a renowned author of books for young people (Las durmientes, Algo más que sexo...). He has premiered his theatre internationally and has tackled audiovisual creation at Red Flags (Atresmedia) as a scriptwriter, executive producer and responsible for the original idea.
María Mínguez Arias, narrator and essayist (Madrid, Spain) is the author of Nombrar el cuerpo (2022), chosen among the best LGBTQ+ literature of the year in Spain by Qué Leer magazine; and the novel Patricia sigue aquí (2018), winner of an ILBA award. Her stories, essays and reviews appear in anthologies and magazines in the United States, Spain and Mexico. She is co-editor of #NiLocasNiSolas: An anthology of fiction written by women in the United States (2023) and an active member of #NewLatinoBoom, the Spanish-language writing movement in the United States in the first quarter of the 21st century.