The Hay 30 – Laia JUFRESA

2015 is the Year of Mexico in the UK and the Year of the UK in Mexico. To celebrate we’re working with the British Council and Conaculta to present México20, a project that promotes 20 new voices of Mexican writers under the age of 40 and brings their work to an international readership. Come and join three of the emerging superstars of the anthology for an evening of Mexican stories, music and drink. With music from the stunning mariachi band Las Adelitas.

The second of two sessions introducing the most exciting voices of Latin American fiction, award-winning stars of the 2018 selection for Bogota 39, and launching the English-language edition of a globally published anthology. Ulloa is a short story writer from Peru, whose collection Little Birds beautifully combines cruelty and tenderness. Monge’s The Arid Sky has seen him hailed as a Mexican Cormac McCarthy. Jufresa’s masterpiece Umami is a darkly comic portrayal of contemporary life in Mexico City. They talk to Daniel Hahn.

Four of Latin America’s best writers aged under 40 choose one or two writers from any Latin American country, plus an international author, whose work they admire. At this event Gabriela Jauregui (Mexico), Laia Jufresa (Mexico), Alan Mills (Guatemala) and Jesús Miguel Soto (México) talk to the journalist Winston Manrique about their recommendations.

With its taut narrative and its wincingly visceral portrait of a man locked in an uneven struggle with the forces of nature, Jones’s Cove is a powerful new work from one of the most distinctive voices in British fiction. Jufresa’s Umami is a quietly devastating novel of missed encounters, missed opportunities, missed people, and those who are left behind. Compassionate, surprising, funny and inventive, it deftly unpicks their stories to offer a darkly comic portrait of contemporary Mexico, as whimsical as it is heart-wrenching.