At the Espacio Mercado in Getafe, the programming for the XIX Madrid Detective Novel Festival, Getafe Negro has been unveiled. From October 14 to 25, the festival will showcase more than sixty activities, including panel discussions, roundtables, talks, conferences, screenings, podcasts, live radio, theater, concerts, workshops, role-playing games, storytelling sessions, exhibitions, and reading clubs. The edition, which will bring together more than a hundred authors, will widen its horizons with guests arriving from across three continents: Europe, America, and Asia. It will commence on October 14 at Getafe’s Federico García Lorca Theatre, with a special event: the commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the premiere of The Boy in the Last Row by Juan Mayorga, in collaboration with the Instituto Cervantes. There will be a screening of the film adaptation of the play directed by filmmaker François Ozon (In the House, 2012), followed by a panel featuring Mayorga himself, and with the presence of Getafe Negro’s honorary director, Lorenzo Silva.
A festival full of promise
Maica Rivera, director of Getafe Negro, was in charge of presenting this program: “On the threshold of what will be a remarkable 20th anniversary in 2027, we demonstrate that Getafe Negro is a festival full of promise, though seasoned, yet audacious, and younger in spirit than ever. We will inaugurate an academic congress, intensify efforts to promote reading in more Getafe high schools, and double the reach of Getafe Negro & Fantástico during the first weekend with two of the greatest international figures of the moment, the American Catriona Ward who will present her novel Flames in Nuncanada (Runas), and the festival’s patron, the Dutch Thomas Olde Heuvelt who will present his novel Dark Days (Nocturna); and, in the festival’s second weekend, we will host a novelists’ roundtable featuring young authors of romantasy with whom we will explore, in this popular genre, its ties to crime, mystery, conspiracy and the mafia, one of the recurring themes in this year’s program.”
Rivera underscored the participation of Eduardo Mendoza, on October 20, at the Mutua Madrileña auditorium, as “one of the festival’s major milestones, to celebrate the enduring appeal of the nameless detective, the most entertaining investigator in Spanish literature, and to reaffirm that the best crime fiction can also make us laugh.” In addition, the director highlighted the presence of “two renovators of the crime-noir genre: Barbara Baraldi, a renovator of contemporary Italian noir, who will present the novel Dark Observer, in collaboration with the Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Madrid; and Mai Jia, a renovator of suspense and espionage fiction in China, in collaboration with the Instituto Cervantes, China National Publications Import & Export Group Corporation, Beijing International Book Fair and the China Writers Association.”
Luis José Domínguez Iglesias, Getafe’s Councillor for Culture, also took part in the presentation and expressed gratitude for the involvement of institutions, partners and professionals who make a new edition of the festival possible. “We are facing a particularly ambitious edition, both for the quality of its participants and for the variety and number of activities we will be able to enjoy over these days. It will also be a superb preview of what we want the XX edition of Getafe Negro to be next year: a significant anniversary for a festival that has already become part of Getafe’s cultural identity.”
For her part, Sara Hernández, the mayor of Getafe, highlighted the international dimension and the diversity of an edition that once again projects Getafe as a meeting point for crime literature. She also stated that “public institutions must ensure that the cultural world always has a free space, open to debate, criticism and recognition. Getafe Negro is the irrefutable proof of what we can achieve when we come together instead of dividing.”
First Congress of Detective Novels
The town of Getafe, near Madrid, will host in mid-October its First Congress of Detective Novels, one of the main novelties of the XIX edition of the Getafe Negro Festival. Organized in collaboration with the International University of La Rioja (UNIR), this first congress will take place on the 15th, 16th and 17th at the Espacio Mercado, which will become a forum for交流 between academic research and literary creation focused on crime fiction, the thriller, and their contemporary offshoots.
Under the title “Stephen King and the Mutations of Noir”, the congress will address topics such as violence, memory and social conflict; rural noir (film noir); identities and margins; women and violence in contemporary noir; and crime spaces between countryside, city and society.
It will also naturally extend into other activities such as the screening of The Shining, by Stanley Kubrick, for high school students, or a roundtable of experts that will relate Stephen King to pop culture, the centenary of Marilyn Monroe and the tenth anniversary of David Bowie’s death.