Journalism Workshop with Helena de Bertodano and Laura Ventura

A good journalist should approach any interview in the same way that Albert Camus approached his urge to write: ‘as if my need were infinite and nothing and no one could satisfy it’. Each question should be a challenge, not to make the interviewer look good or to impress the audience, but rather to allow the interviewee to take us, step by step, into his or her inner world, and reveal what lies beneath. What matters is to engage the interviewee with questions that lead to a coherent story, and that, without fighting with the individual, force him or her to say more than they expected. In this workshop, two renowned journalists will unravel the essentials of a good interview, whether for the traditional paper or digital format, or for social media.

The workshop will be given by Helena de Bertodano and Laura Ventura. De Bertodano is a journalist specialising in celebrity interviews and profiles, as well as features and travel articles for publications such as The Sunday Times, The Times, The Telegraph, The Observer, Harper's Bazaar and Marie Claire. She has interviewed over a thousand people in the last 25 years, including the Dalai Lama, Meryl Streep, George Soros, Ringo Starr, George Best, Yehudi Menuhin and Jacinda Ardern. Laura Ventura holds a PhD in Hispanic Philology from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and teaches Literature at the Universidad Carlos III. She has also written several sections in the Argentine newspaper La Nación for the past two decades. She has interviewed personalities such as Joaquín Sabina, Elena Poniatowska, Paul Auster, Javier Cercas, Pedro Almodóvar, Joan Manuel Serrat, Isabel Allende and Mikhail Baryshnikov, among others.

The young people taking part in the workshop will be able to choose one of the celebrities taking part in Hay Festival Forum Seville, conduct a one-minute interview with them using their mobile phone, and share it on social media.

Event in Spanish