Peter Florence

Director of Hay Festival

After Segovia in 2007, Granada will hold the Hay Festival this year for the first time. New Spanish Books has interviewed the event´s director, Peter Florence.

The Hay Festival was born 20 years ago in a small Welsh town and nowadays it is also held in Spain and Colombia. Other countries like Italy or Brazil hold the festival as well. Can you explain the Hay Festival evolution?
Strangely it is very much how it first was. The idea was always that it would be very relaxed, very informal, to mix a degree of show business with a degree of intellectual enquiry. And to make it feel as much as possible like a family party and I guess that style is what has succeeded around the world. It is just like a big family with different eccentricities in different parts. The Colombian is wilder and the Spanish is much more relaxed and in some sense more confident. So yes, it is a big family and different parts of the family keep meeting new friends and bringing them home so it feels quite organic with development.

Why have you chosen Granada to hold the festival?
Because there is no place on earth that better fulfils the aspiration to develop an exchange between East and West, to be a meeting place for the Arab world and Europe. And also because everybody wants to go to Granada and we just wanted to have a little pretext for going.

When Bill Clinton attended the Hay Festival he described it as the “Woodstock of the mind”. And when while visiting Granada, he said that the city has “the best sunset in the world”. So, could this possibly be the best festival in the best city?
You know, you always look for the perfect location and it could be that we found it.

According to a survey carried out last year by Associated Press, one in four adults say they hadn’t read a single book the year before. To what extent would you say that Hay Festival and Book Fairs increase people’s interest in books?
Anything we can do to share the pleasure of books is good but we are not just about books. We have always taken the line that great writing is great writing whether it is for film or song writing or comedy…you know we have Enrique Morente, we have Anouar Brahem, we have some of the greatest musicians in Europe coming to take part in this festival. It is more about sharing ideas and stories that it is just about books. Books can’t unite people, can’t unite everybody, football doesn’t unite everybody, politics doesn’t unite everybody. You make friends where you can.

What do you think about the e-books and the new devices, like Kindle, which are supposed to make reading easier?
Anything that makes stories more accessible for people is good. There is a pleasure in the art of packing the book which is like the pleasure you get from sculpture. But the story is what really matters and it doesn’t matter what media you get it through as long as you get the idea of a new vision of somebody else’s life, then you are getting the experience.

In your opinion, how are Spanish books perceived in the UK?
Better and better. I think there has been a break-through in the last couple of years and it has been led by bestsellers like Carlos Ruiz Zafón and Javier Cercas but the more we can do to introduce the amazing world of Spanish literature to Britain the happier we will all be.

Which is the last book from a Spanish author you have read?
Well, the last stories I have read have been stories we have commissioned to a group of writers through the Biblioteca Mapfre. We commission stories and poetry from young from across Latin-America and Spain. We have used Andrés Neuman, Santiago Roncagliolo and Juan Gabriel Vásquez to write stories only available online. And all the stories I have read by the young Spanish and Latin-American writers have been thrilling, actually. I am amazed by how vibrant the short story form can be.

Could you recommend a book from a Spanish author to our readers?
“Los informantes” by Juan Gabriel Vásquez, bloody brilliant.