King Juan Carlos Chair CRISTINA PATO | ROUND TABLE AND RECITAL: Bilingual Societies and Sustainability: Spain’s other languages

Cristina Pato is the 2019 / 2020 King Juan Carlos Chair in Spanish Culture and Civilization, NYU King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center.

This round table and poetry recital will focus on the idea of cultural sustainability through the experience of three mayor editors of Galician, Catalan, and Basque literature. Francisco Castro, writer and director of Editorial Galaxia (Galicia), Rosa Rey, director of Angle Editorial and Capital Books (Catalunya) and Lorea Agirre, director of Jakin Magazine (Basque Country) will share their experiences of survival and resistance in a country with four official languages (Spain). This conversation aims to bring a different perspective on Spain’s other languages, and will combine music and poetry in Galician, Basque and Catalan.

*Francisco Castro, writer and publisher (Editorial Galaxia’s CEO) has covered numerous topics in his books for adults and young people – a collection of erotic stories, Geographies, a book narrated by a drug dealer, Lost Generation, a historical novel set in the sixteenth century, The Words of Mist, which won the García Barros Prize. He has won the Blanco Amor Prize for a long novel with Spam, the Voz de Galicia Prize for a novel by instalments with The Heart of Snow White, and the Sarmiento Prize awarded by Galician schoolchildren on five occasions… Politica commentator on Galician Public Television and Radio, and analyst in La Voz de Galicia and catalonian newspapers.

*Rosa Rey was born in Barcelona in 1974, she studied Spanish Studies at the University of Barcelona and later, a Postgraduate Degree in Publishing and Editing at the same university. After working as a freelance proofreader, copywriter and editor, she was editor for Masson Doyma, a publishing house specialized in Medicine, for three years. In 2007 she was hired by Angle Editorial and since 2011 she is the Editorial in Chief. Angle Editorial publishes fiction and non-fiction of national and international authors, exclusively into Catalan language.

*Lorea Agirre Dorronsoro, journalist and anthropologist, is the director of the cultural and magazine Jakin. She has been a journalist for several years in various media in Basque language, such as the magazine Argia and the newspapers Egunkaria and Berria, and has worked as a professor in several universities in the Basque Country. She has published two biographies and a journalistic book, among others. Her latest publication is an essay on the relationship between minorized languages and gender, applied to the case of the normalization of Euskara, which she investigates as a PhD student at the University of the Basque Country. She also does research work on the relationship between language, culture and communities.