Literature becomes a meeting point for memory, democracy and exile.
Madrid
Centroamérica Cuenta will bring together more than 30 writers, journalists, artists and intellectuals in Spain from September 10 to 19, with Sergio Ramírez, Gioconda Belli, Martín Caparrós, Juan Villoro and Jorge Volpi among the leading figures. The festival will unfold across La Rinconada, Madrid and Barcelona, expanding a cultural platform that has progressively connected Central American debates with audiences across the Spanish-speaking world. Its program combines literature with journalism, politics, historical memory and contemporary social questions. The result is an event that approaches culture not as an isolated artistic space, but as a forum for understanding the tensions shaping Ibero-America.
The festival will begin in La Rinconada, near Seville, with two days devoted to narrative, journalism, society and creativity. Madrid will then become its main stage from September 14 to 18, with activities at institutions including Instituto Cervantes, Casa de América and CentroCentro, as well as bookstores and municipal libraries. Participants will include Horacio Castellanos Moya, Rosa Ribas, Álvaro Enrigue, Regina José Galindo, Laura Chinchilla, Carlos Fernando Chamorro, Claudia Paz y Paz and Laura Alcoba. Discussions will address democratic institutions, crime and horror literature, historical memory and the practice of journalism from exile.
Barcelona will host the final stage on September 18 and 19, extending the conversations through literary encounters, readings and discussions. The geographical expansion reflects Centroamérica Cuenta’s transformation from a festival founded in Managua in 2013 into an itinerant cultural platform. Since 2019, the initiative has traveled beyond Nicaragua, and Sergio Ramírez’s forced departure from his country has given the festival an additional symbolic dimension. Literature, displacement and political freedom have consequently become intertwined with its institutional evolution.
That trajectory gives the Spanish edition significance beyond its roster of celebrated authors. Writers such as Ramírez, Belli, Villoro, Caparrós and Volpi represent different national traditions, but their participation creates a shared space for examining democracy, identity, power and the responsibilities of intellectual life. Centroamérica Cuenta is increasingly functioning as a bridge between Central America, Latin America and Europe at a moment when exile and democratic fragility remain urgent realities. The festival demonstrates that literature can still do something politics often struggles to achieve: create a common language for societies confronting different versions of the same uncertainties.
Narrative is power too. / La narrativa también es poder.