Kosmopolis 2015
8th Amplified Literature Fest
Thank you
Kosmopolis
These have been five days of high intensity where we have been joined by over 8,900 people. Five days of literary exchanges, of debates on the future of journalism, on Europe, on the legacy of W. G. Sebald and the anniversary of Alice in Wonderland. We have enjoyed the attendance by over 150 ...
Pep Prieto, Enric Ros and Serielizados
Series for Social Change?
From the West Wing of the White House to Borgen, from The Wire to The Thick of It, over the last 20 years television fiction has shown us many different ways of doing politics and of conveying politicians. Evil, useless, charismatic, ...
Raquel Crisóstomo and Enric Ros
American Spleen: Mad Men and Women
Mathew Weiner, creator of Mad Men, doesn’t hide his desire to introduce us into the inner workings of the “American mind”. The series rewinds to a period of existential crossroads, where triumphalism coexisted with desperation, the American dream and the “metaphysical ...
Kosmopolis 15. Adopting a Language. Winners of Germany’s Adelbert von Chamisso Prize
Dialogue with Marjana Gaponenko, Abbas Khider and Klaus Hübner
In a globalized world, there is a growing number of writers who move from one country to another and start writing in the language of their host country. How do they experience this process? How does the culture of a country change as its literary voices become more diverse? What particular ...
Ivan Pintor
In the Shadow of Carcosa: True Detective and Television Horror
Perhaps because television is always a visit to the house of the viewer, an intrusion of privacy, series have often cultivated horror conceived as the expansion of a negativity that is attached to the most everyday gestures. True Detective is not only heir to a literary legacy which ...
Aitor Gabilondo, Javier Olivares and Isabel Vázquez
Escríbeme una serie
We are used to listening to actors, directors, even producers, talking about titles that they are working on. In the TV programme Escríbeme una serie (Write Me a Series), the protagonists are the scriptwriters and we want them to tell us why those stories that we get hooked ...
Aniol Rafel
The Leftovers: Remains of a Series or Audiovisual Literature?
Aniol Rafel is the founder and director of the independent publisher Edicions del Periscopi. During Kosmopolis 2015, he talked about the decision to publish the novel "The Leftovers" (Tom Perrotta) in catalan. To publish a book that is converted into an HBO series involves an entire series ...
Carles Bosch, Marc Pastor and Serielizados
Colloquium with Carles Bosch, Marc Pastor and Serielizados
Baltimore, 1999. One day, Hae Min Lee disappears from school. Six weeks later, her fellow student and ex-boyfriend Adnan Syed is arrested for her murder. He says that he is innocent, but that he cannot remember what he was doing that afternoon. Journalist Sarah Koenig decides to start investigating ...
Kosmopolis 15. New Business Models in The Publishing Industry: Abundance of Content, Forms of Access and Revenue Generation
Lecture by Carmen Ospina (Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial)
The coincidence of the economic crisis and the change of paradigm brought about by the irruption of the digital into the publishing world, the difficulty of managing the attention economy in the face of an abundance of all manner of contents in a variety of formats, and the changes undergone by both our content consumption habits and the value we accord them are major challenges for the publishing industry.
Kosmopolis 15. The Book: from Print to Pixel. The State of Play
Lecture by Javier Celaya (Dosdoce)
When the electronic book came into being, it seemed as though the print version would have to bow out. Recent news items and studies confirm that, for the moment, this won’t happen, but the influence and importance of the print book in the digital society continues to decrease. Is the ...
Jon Lee Anderson and Martín Caparrós
Kosmopolis 15. Wars and Hunger J
How do you write about the urgency of a war, the weight of famine, the ins and outs of a dictatorship? How do you make something that is very distant suddenly very close? Sometimes the best journalism happens on the edges; sometimes it is a form of literature. American Jon Lee Anderson and Argentinian Martín Caparrós, two of today’s most clear-sighted chroniclers, discuss a profession that has taken them around the world: its tools, its challenges, its secrets and its limits. ...
Jordi Nopca, Maria Rodés and Nico Roig
Do you wolf down music or are you a word gourmet?
“The thing I like best about Spain is Mercadona’s sobrasada”, says writer Michel Houllebecq quite unashamedly. You think what you eat. There is a direct relation between what you eat and what you write. But how do you chew a concept and how do you digest ...
Kosmopolis 15. The Speed of Fiction
Dialogue with Rachel Kushner and Eduardo Lago
The multitude of voices and trends coexisting in today’s US narrative make that country’s literature one of the most active laboratories for the novel’s immediate future. In this extraordinarily vital field, the work of Rachel Kushner is part of a trend that incorporates elements ...
Mina Holland
Literature and Gastronomy: from Lewis Carroll to Arundhati Roy
Author of The Edible Atlas and Editor of Cook, The Guardian‘s Saturday food supplement, Mina Holland talks about the relationship between food and literature. Why did she infuse her food and travel book with references to literature? How did she choose them? How ...
Kosmopolis 15. The Sebaldian Legacy in The 21st Century
Dialogue with Cristina Rivera Garza and Camille de Toledo
In her essay Los muertos indóciles. Necroescrituras y desapropiación, Mexican novelist Cristina Rivera Garza considers the strategies that literature uses today to talk about institutional violence, killings and drug trafficking. Meanwhile, in Le hêtre et le bouleau: Essai sur la...
Kosmopolis 15. The Looking Glass House
Lecture by Vanessa Tait
Vanessa Tait, great-grandaughter of the Alice who inspired Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, tells the fascinating story of the childhood classic’s strange beginnings through the eyes of a naive and deceived governess.
Carles Capdevila
Kosmopolis 15. Seven Reasons for Believing in a Great Future for Journalism
The end of monopolies, digital narratives, new tools for research and users’ needs to find filters and referents for avoiding “infoxication”, or information overload, are all urgent opportunities for journalism. Carles Capdevila, editor of Ara newspaper, said: “We ...
Kosmopolis 15. Europe in Translation - The Schwob/Finnegan’s List Project
Dialogue with Hoda Barakat, Jordi Puntí, Alida Bremer and Misia Sert
Have you heard of Miroslav Krleža, Joan-Daniel Bezsonoff or Ibn Hazm? They’re some of the authors of outstanding works which, according to the participants in this round table, deserve to be translated and known by readers the world over. Foremost writers Hoda Barakat, Jordi Puntí ...
Kosmopolis 15. Mirroring Myths and Dogmas
Dialogue with Robert Coover and Màrius Serra
The writer, journalist and enigmatist Màrius Serra, winner of the 2013 Sant Jordi Novel Prize, talks to Robert Coover, one of the most prolific and unorthodox writers of US literature. The dialogue explores the iconoclastic invasion of the tribal, religious, political, national, social, ...
Kosmopolis 15. Alice and The Dreams of Reason
Lecture by Alberto Manguel
In a world of madmen, Alice is the voice of reason. Faced with the absurd rules that govern Wonderland and the baleful bureaucracy through the looking glass, Alice bravely sticks to her human, civic and ethical convictions. From this point of view, Lewis Carroll’s books can be seen as ...
Kosmopolis 15. Alice in Wonderslam: Barcelona Grand Slam
Recital and competition
Barcelona Poetry Slam celebrates year two of the Barcelona Grand Slam, an oral poetry contest with an international scope that brings back to our city some of the world’s foremost slammers to compete against the participants in the poetry slam held every month at the CCCB. Three minutes, ...
Kosmopolis 15. The Stomach of the Writers (2). Can’t Catalan literature stomach excess?
Dialogue with Bel Olid and Borja Bagunyà.
“The thing I like best about Spain is Mercadona’s sobrasada”, says writer Michel Houllebecq quite unashamedly. You think what you eat. There is a direct relation between what you eat and what you write. But how do you chew a concept and how do you digest ...
Kosmopolis 15. The Lessons of Fiktion, an International Model Project on Digital Literature
Lecture with Ingo Niermann
Fiktion.cc is a publishing project set up in 2013 by German- and English-language writers to explore the digital distribution of challenging literature. In cooperation with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), and funded by a grant from the German Federal Cultural Foundation, Fiktion publishes ...
Kosmopolis 15. Sebald and Grossman: Parallel Ambitions
Dialogue with David Grossman and Carles Torner
The literary projects of German writer W. G. Sebald and Israeli writer David Grossman are united by the themes they address (memory, migration, travel, holocaust) and their relevance and ambition. Carles Torner talks to the author of master works such as See under: Love and To the End of the Land ab...
Kosmopolis 15. Innovation and Digital Narratives for Writers and Editors
Lecture by Nathan Hull (Mofibo)
How are authors and editors adapting to storytelling in the digital age? Why should publishers start experimenting with this type of narrative? What are the challenges and opportunities? At the 4th edition of Bookcamp Kosmopolis, Nathan Hull answers these questions with examples of his experience at Penguin Random House UK and Mofibo, including YourFry, the recent multilingual global platform set up with the collaboration of Stephen Fry.
Kosmopolis 15. Literature and Imposture
Dialogue with Javier Cercas y Mathias Enard
What happens in the distance that separates the author from the narrator? Is fabulation, sham or imposture inevitable when practising the art of the novel? Two great European novelists, Mathias Enard and Javier Cercas, discuss this very old yet very new subject in their own experiences as the authors of, among other major works, Zona, which narrates the adventures and travels around the Mediterranean of a spy (the artist of imposture), and El impostor, portraying Enric Marco, who falsified his biography to appear as a survivor of Nazi concentration camps.
Kosmopolis 15. Vinicio Capossela’s Greek Ledger
Vinicio Capossela. Accompanied by Dimitris Mistakidis and Valeria Bergalli
“Crisis: a concept related to rebetika, a form of music that is born of separation, and related to Greece itself, from which Europe is becoming separated”, writes Vinicio Capossela in the opening pages of Tefteri. El libro de las cuentas pendientes (Minúscula, 2014), ...
William T. Vollmann and Juan Francisco Ferré
Literature on The Edge
Juan Francisco Ferré, winner of the 2012 Herralde Prize and expert in US literature, talks to the author of Europe Central, The Rainbow Stories and The Royal Family about the origins and motivations of his work. An exciting talk with one of the foremost living ...
Kosmopolis 15. The Stomach of the Writers (1). The spiritual food of a poet and a playwright
Dialogue with Unai Velasco and María Folguera.
“The thing I like best about Spain is Mercadona’s sobrasada”, says writer Michel Houllebecq quite unashamedly. You think what you eat. There is a direct relation between what you eat and what you write. But how do you chew a concept and how do you digest ...
Je suis Madame Bovary et vous êtes Chewbacca
Jose Valenzuela Ruiz
The need to tell stories has always been with mankind, whether it be to describe reality or to imagine alternative worlds. When we read, we become heroes, adventurers, aliens, detectives, lovers, and beings with a thousand masks in utopian […]
Taiye Selasi and Xavier Aldekoa
The Afropolitan Condition
African reality is richer, more complex and creative than might be gleaned from the media. A new generation of writers and journalists is changing our perception of a continent with over a thousand millions inhabitants and almost two thousand languages. At Kosmopolis 2015, Taiye Selasi, an ...
Kosmopolis 15. A Narrator, a Biographer and a Publisher
Dialogue with Juan Marsé, Josep Maria Cuenca and Jorge Herralde
On 18 February of this year, Barcelona-based publishers Anagrama released the first research biography centred on the figure of novelist Juan Marsé: Mientras llega la felicidad, a work by Josep Maria Cuenca. Within the ideal framework that is Kosmopolis, we propose a dialogue on the ...
Guide for following Kosmopolis wherever you may be
Eva Rexach
A festival like Kosmopolis could not call itself the “Amplified Literature Fest” if it did not offer all of its contents on all possible channels. Therefore, we have selected some activities so that you can follow them by streaming wherever you may be. In addition, our social networks ...
Five itineraries to discover Kosmopolis
Eva Rexach
Kosmopolis is a place for falling in love with literature and for letting yourself be carried away by the very varied proposals that fill all the corners of the CCCB. And it can be enjoyed in many different ways. Here we suggest a few. […]
It’s Not Just an Economic Cycle, It’s a Change of Era
Javier Celaya
Given that print book sales have dropped 40% over the last decade, do we really think that when we finally emerge from this damn crisis readers will go out and buy print books again? The fall in print book sales is not just due to the crisis. […]
Literatures for Dialogue
Eva Rexach
The K Dialogues are, for this K15, more literary than ever before. Seven chats between writers on subjects as diverse as the limits of literature, the personality of the writer, imposture, the narration of privacy or American letters. A varied menu with some of the most important names in the ...
Crimes, Politics and Music: the series of Canal+ come to Kosmopolis
Eva Rexach
From Olive Kitteridge to Game of Thrones, from Borgen to True Detective, Sunday 22nd is the series day at Kosmopolis. The best literary series explained by writers, publishers, musicians and fans. […]
150 Years Dreaming About Alice
Eva Rexach
Kosmopolis pays tribute to one of the great works of universal literature, a tale dreamed up one summer afternoon that has transcended genres and cultures and that, 150 years later, continues to be fiercely current. After the works of Shakespeare, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and ...
Alpha Channel: cinema, series and video poetry at Kosmopolis
Eulàlia Guarro
The Alpha Channel is expanding. We’ll be laying down the red carpet and rolling it out beyond the classic programming of the evenings with Alpha Nights: feature films and cinema premieres based on literary works, music, writers and journalists. And sessions all-day Sunday devoted to television ...
Writing Labs
Eva Rexach
How does a story begin? What’s the creation process? What do authors do while they are writing? The Writing Labs will let us know where literature begins. […]
The Limits of Books
Maria Farràs
Can books reach a limit? The fourth edition of the BookCamp Kosmopolis will try to answer this question through different points of view: from paper to pixel, the transition into the digital format, amplified narrative and intellectual property.
Music and Literature for Transcending the Frontiers of Europe
Eva Rexach
Vinicio Capposella, Jordi Puntí, Hoda Barakat, Abbas Khider... the authors of Translating Europe live and write in a continent where language and music serve as the connection.
Journalism, Literature and New Media
Eva Rexach
What do Jon Lee Anderson and Martin Caparrós have in common with Gay Talese and Truman Capote? Are stories better thanks to data journalism? How can literature transform contemporary facts into pieces of art? Journalism XXI will try to answer these questions.
Would you like to know wich authors will take part in K15?
Quima Farré
The full programme of the festival will be announced in mid-February 2015. Until then, here’s a preview of some of our outstanding guests: David Grossman, Rachel Kushner, Cristina Rivera Garza, Camille de Toledo, Taiye Selasi, Carles Torner and William T. Vollmann. David Grossman Considered ...
A Journey through the Memory of W. G. Sebald
Eva Rexach
Kosmopolis 2015 pays tribute to W. G. Sebald with a variety of literary activities, coinciding with «Sebald Variations» exhibition that will be inaugurated on 10 March. Memory, travel and history will be the main themes of the programme. W. G. Sebald, the writer associated with ...