The Diplomat
The Instituto Cervantes will hold numerous cultural and academic activities this week as part of the Frankfurt Book Fair, where Spain is the Guest of Honor. Among the most important events are the meeting of Queen Letizia with German Hispanists and Spanish teachers at the Cervantes headquarters in the city and the organization of a colloquium on the economic power of Spanish, with the participation of Vice President Nadia Calviño and Minister Miquel Iceta.
The Fair will be inaugurated tomorrow by the King and Queen of Spain in the presence of the President of the Federal Republic of Germany, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Nearly 200 Spanish authors will participate in the Fair, whose motto will be Creativity overflowing and in which Spain will have a Pavilion of 2,000 square meters. The Spain Guest of Honor project at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2022 is led by the Ministry of Culture and Sport through the Directorate General for Books and the Promotion of Reading, together with Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) and the Spanish Publishers’ Guild Federation.
The following day, the Queen will attend a meeting with German Hispanists at the headquarters of the Cervantes Institute in Frankfurt. The event will begin with welcoming remarks by the director of the institution, Luis García Montero, and will be followed by a round table discussion entitled Homage to German Hispanism, moderated by the veteran Dieter Ingenschay (1948), professor emeritus of Hispanic literatures at the Humboldt University of Berlin. The hispanists Danae Gallo González, Marco García García, Lena Hein, Marília Déa Jöhnk and Victoria del Valle will participate. On the same Wednesday, Luis García Montero will hold a colloquium with the writer Antonio Muñoz Molina entitled Más allá de las fronteras de la imaginación (Beyond the borders of imagination), which will be presented by Elvira Marco.
On Thursday, the 20th, a round table discussion will be held entitled El español y el poder económico de la lengua en la era digital (Spanish and the Economic Power of Language in the Digital Age), with García Montero and the Minister of Culture and Sports, Miquel Iceta. The meeting will be closed by the First Vice President of the Government and Minister of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation, Nadia Calviño. The moderator will be Cristina Gallach, journalist and Special Commissioner for the Alliance for a New Language Economy, a government initiative to make Spanish the language of reference in the field of knowledge and artificial intelligence.
Literature, cinema and soccer
The academic activity will return on Thursday to the Cervantes headquarters, which will host the round table discussion The role of literature in the Spanish language classroom, with Carmen Pastor, Academic Director of the Cervantes Institute. The debate is organized in collaboration with the German Association of Spanish Teachers (DSV). In addition, on the same day, a talk will be held at the Cervantes with three Spanish illustrators whose works are featured in the exhibition Ilustrad/AS. A look at female creation in avant-garde illustration: Sonia Pulido, María Hesse and Núria Tamarit.
On Friday, October 21, García Montero will be in dialogue at the Fair with two other renowned poets: Carlos Marzal and Raquel Lanseros, who will act as moderator. The roundtable is entitled Poesía en tiempos de intemperie (Poetry in Times of Intemperance). Spanish independent cinema created between 2015 and 2020 will have a place with the cycle La realidad desbordante (The overflowing reality). Organized by the Cervantes Institute, A/CE and the German Film Archive (DFF), it offers more than a dozen Spanish films that can be seen until March 30.
On Saturday, March 22, the heads of the Institute and Casa Árabe, Luis García Montero and Irene Lozano, will be holding a round table discussion on Literature and Soccer at the Cervantes, after signing a collaboration agreement between the two institutions. This event is the appetizer of another meeting, this time a sporting one. In the afternoon, the Los Cervantinos team, made up of Spanish writers and journalists, and the German team, made up of authors from Germany, will play a soccer match. The Spanish team includes Nuria Labari, Enrique Ballester, Álex Grijelmo, Gabi Martínez, Pablo García Casado, Emilio Sánchez Mediavilla and Álex Prada, among others. As is traditional in each edition of the Fair, the Kulturstiftung of the German Football Federation (DFB) organizes a clash between representatives of the guest of honor country (in this case, Spain) and the national team.
