Benengeli 2023.

While it is assumed that the modern narrative burst forth as the story of characters who were unaware of heroism and who felt distant from the incarnation of the virtues of a people, the variety of proposals in Spanish-language narrative also seems to make occasional nods to certain aspects of the literary tradition.

Therein lies the clarity of an essential question.

Thus the clarity of an essential question: Is there a novelistic, a storytelling, in which reflections of what was the ancient epic can be glimpsed? What happens with poetry?

What happens with poetry?

From an ironic vision, from a possible rewriting, from a nostalgia and an unfulfilled need to tell stories that found and explain a collective reality marked by heroes, can it be said that some current voices are trying to redefine the status of the epic in the face of prosaic reality?

What about the epic?

The epic, as rejection, as longing, as reworking or misunderstanding, as necessity, is the intuited shadow within a significant number of current literary fictions in our language, so this new meeting aims to know the way in which a significant number of authors face, evade or move away from this expressive possibility that television or film fictions, video games and sports chronicles, seem to face with greater clarity.

More than sixty authors from Spain, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Guatemala, Equatorial Guinea, Mexico, Panama, Puerto Rico and Venezuela will dialogue with writers from Australia, Belgium, Morocco and the United Kingdom with the intention of gauging whether the epic is merely nostalgia or evidence of a metamorphosis with aesthetic consequences.

Benengeli 2023, the only literary festival in Spanish that spans and travels the five continents, returns to the road to shed light on this question, around which Jorge Luis Borges expressed in the late sixties a curious prediction: "since the future contains many things - perhaps the future contains all things - I think that the epic will return to us.