Jazz icon trumpeter Miles Davis is credited with the phrase “silence is the loudest noise.” This year, the Bogotá International Book Fair seeks to honor the power of that stillness. The 38th edition of the event, which runs from this Tuesday until May 4 and mobilizes more than half a million citizens each year, offers silence as its central theme: the silence necessary for attentive reading, especially the kind stolen by social media and catastrophic news. “I believe silence is significant, with so much hopelessness, for us to reconnect with the written word,” says Adriana Ángel, director of FILBO. “The book can once again be our meeting point.”
Read more Javier Milei faces the dilemma of lowering inflation or reactivating economic activity
Therefore, FILBO recommends reading about the silence of justice in Franz Kafka’s The Trial, or the silence in the office in Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener. But the tributes to silence will not make for a silent fair: there are at least 2,300 events, including a political debate scheduled for April 28 with the candidates competing for the presidency of Colombia three weeks later. “We are in the process of confirming attendance,” says Ángel. FILBO arrives on time: the leading candidate, Iván Cepeda, has decided to change his position this weekend about not attending debates. The candidates will not be the only politicians in the enormous pavilions of FILBO, at the Corferias convention center. Former president Juan Manuel Santos, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, will be on Sunday, May 3, in conversation with three victims of the armed conflict, ten years after the signing of the agreement that demobilized the FARC guerrilla group.
Other global icons will include Martin Baron, former editor of The Washington Post and 18-time Pulitzer Prize winner, with that newspaper’s team and previously with The Boston Globe. Baron led the famous investigation that exposed sexual abuse by the church in Boston, which was later depicted in the film Spotlight. In 2024, his book Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post was published in Spanish, about the pressures the media outlet received from the American president and the newspaper’s new owner and Amazon billionaire. From Amazonian activism, Nemonte Nenquimo, an Ecuadorian indigenous woman who won the Goldman Prize in 2020, the most important award for environmental leaders, will be present. She comes to present her book We Are Jaguars about her people, the Waorani. “For many decades, my ancestors did not want to tell their story; it was a secret and sacred place they kept in connection with the earth and everything that lives within the jungle. I was very afraid, but I decided to do it,” she told El PAÍS in 2024.
The guest country is India, which is officially coming to the Bogotá fair for the first time, and will offer editions of its literature in Spanish, English, and Hindi in a special pavilion. Among the 35 writers arriving in Colombia will be Deepti Kapoor, known because her novel, Age of Vice, became a bestseller translated into 15 languages and was adapted for the screen by FX and Fox 21. Also featured is Kiran Desai, a Booker Prize finalist last year with her novel The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. The novelist took two decades to publish another book after The Inheritance of Loss, another bestseller that won the Booker in 2006. “I set out to address loneliness from a global perspective, from Eastern and Western viewpoints, contemplating it as sustenance, as a stigma, and as political fear,” she recently told this newspaper about the new novel.
Read more Erik Saracho: “If they kill me now, the message that remains is that of a failed State”
Then there will be stars of Spanish literature such as the Mexican David Toscana, who won the latest Alfaguara Novel Prize with The Blind Army; her compatriot Dahlia de la Cerda, best known for her short story collections Reserve Bitches and Medea Sang Me a Corrido; the Uruguayan Tamara Silva Bernaschina, national narrative prize winner in Uruguay last year, who brings her new book of short stories, Larvae, featuring lice and packs of dogs. “I used a lot of what scares me, what disgusts me, to build this disgust that sometimes goes unnamed and leave a void in it,” she said when she launched the book in Spain. And the Colombian Piedad Bonnet, Reina Sofía Prize winner in 2024, will be presenting her new book, The Voice of Things.
There is also space for those who continue to speak even though they are no longer alive, such as Álvaro Cepeda Samudio from Barranquilla, who will be honored on Saturday the 26th, on the centenary of his birth. Someone who surely appreciated silence to make noise with his words. “When you have something to say, it must be shouted,” he said in 1961. “With words of all kinds, without subjection to grammatical or academic rules; openly: words must be taken and with strident punches forced to illustrate the idea.” Words that once again take center stage at FILBO, shouted or in silence.