Hay Festival Arequipa closed on a record year last night (Sunday 11 November) after four days of conversation, debate and exchange between writers and readers in Peru, alongside performances from internationally acclaimed musicians and comedians.
Events covered everything from fiction to food, free speech to football, with guests including writers Mario Vargas Llosa, Salman Rushdie, Helen Fielding, Rosemary Sullivan, Janne Teller, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Julianne Pachico, Karolina Ramqvist and Mario Vargas Llosa; historian Andrea Wulf; physicists Andrés Gomberoff and Christophe Galfard; botanist Carlos Magdalena; AI expert Omar Flórez; journalists Luke Harding and César Hildebrandt; sculptor Doris Salcedo; footballer Julio Cesar Uribe; Bogotá39 stars; and
Hay Festival Creative Wales International Fellow, Dylan Moore.
Nobel Prize for Fiction winner Mario Vargas Llosa said: "Hay Festival is truly extraordinary. It is one of the world's great literary encounters, there is no other festival that brings writers and thinkers together like it."
In numbers...
27,500 attendees
Over 100 events
20% of the general programme free for students
83 events of the general program
80 volunteers
3 photo exhibitions
183 accredited journalists from 72 media outlets
Next year's edition of Hay Festival Arequipa, the fifth, will take place 7-10 November 2019.