The 40th anniversary of Gabo’s Nobel Prize will be commemorated with a festival in Bogotá | MyRedVista.co | Modern digital magazine.

The tenth edition of the Gabo Festival will be held from October 21 to 23 at the Modern Gymnasium, in the capital.

Next October 21 marks the fortieth anniversary of the announcement, by the Swedish Academy, of the Nobel Prize for Literature for our admired cataquero writer Gabriel García Márquez, who was to receive it a month and a half later (December 11) dressed in a classic white linen liquiliqui with which he broke the protocol of that cold ceremony in Stockholm, in the presence of the Swedish king and queen, while leaving his mark as a Caribbean man.

At that ceremony, Gabo, as he is known, was received standing and with applause by the 400 attendees at that ceremony in which he delivered his famous speech The loneliness of Latin America, in which in one of its most famous sections he said: “Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all the creatures of that outrageous reality have had to ask very little of the imagination, because the greatest challenge for us has been been the insufficiency of conventional resources to make our life credible. This, my friends, the crux of our solitude”.

This year, to commemorate that historic moment, that speech will be the central axis of the tenth edition of the Gabo Festival, which this year will be held in Bogotá for the first time, from October 21 to 23.

The Gabo Festival, organized by the Gabo Foundation -created in 1995 by Gabriel García Márquez himself-, is the largest meeting dedicated to journalism, citizenship and culture in Ibero-America.

Varied schedule. In this celebration space, the storytellers of Ibero-America, independent of formats, journalistic genres and themes, will come together to seek new ways of narrating the region and thus contribute to untangling this knot.

That is why meetings will be held that will revolve around journalism, literature, poetry, education, diversity, gender, creativity and innovation. Topics that will be developed in more than 50 activities including workshops, exhibitions, talks and meetings, which will bring together 100 national and international experts.

Among the participants will be the winners of the Gabo Award, which will be announced in the coming weeks. This recognition is given annually and has the objective of encouraging the search for excellence, innovation and ethical coherence in journalism, inspired by the ideals and work of Gabriel García Márquez.

This time, the Festival will have a special emphasis on the audiences, who are becoming more and more protagonists every day in the profession of journalism and communication. Therefore, although its starting point is in journalism, Gabo and stories, this event seeks to involve all members of the public regardless of age.

This is the reason why Bogotá hosts the festival in the Modern Gymnasium as the central point of the program, which includes other activities such as photographic exhibitions, gastronomic offer and concerts.

Gabo in Bogota. In this way, it is also intended to recall the special connection that united Gabriel García Márquez with the country’s capital, where he arrived at the beginning of 1943. It was there that he began his unfinished Law degree at the National University and discovered tram rides and the cafes where poets, writers and intellectuals met.

Eleven years later he was hired by The viewer, a newspaper in which he won a space with the ‘Day by Day’ column. He later polished his style until he became a renowned chronicler with texts like the queen alonein which he insists on the theme of loneliness and power, which he deepened in The Autumn of the Patriarchhis fifth book.

In addition, in 1959 Rodrigo, his first son, was born. A year later, he served as news chief for the Cuban Press Agency, and around the 1990s, the city was the setting for the last journalistic book he published, News of a kidnappingand the place where you purchased the magazine Changealong with other partners.