Thank you

These have been five days of high intensity where we have been joined by over 8,900 people. Five days of literary exchanges, of debates on the future of journalism, on Europe, on the legacy of W. G. Sebald and the anniversary of Alice in Wonderland. We have enjoyed the attendance by over 150 contributing participants from 19 countries and have organised over 80 activities and 24 workshops at the BookCamp. We screened 40 feature films, documentaries and short films via Alpha Channel, and we discovered new television series, new authors and new forms of writing, publishing and reading books.

#Kosmopolis was protagonist in the media, both digital and analogical. From the first chronicles on the festival to the articles on W. G. Sebald and Robert Coover and the interviews with Paolo Giordano, Mina Holland, Alberto Manguel and William T. Vollmann, to cite a few examples. And it has also been protagonist on the social networks, with over 17 million impressions on Twitter, a virtual audience of nearly 3 million followers from Spain, Colombia, Brazil, Germany, United States, Mexico, Argentina, France, United Kingdom, Finland and Greece and over 6,000 tweets generated with the hashtag #K15. The festival website received over 16,000 visits and nearly 800 people followed the activities via streaming.

In the coming weeks, Kosmopolis will be amplified even further on the social networks. We will put up videos of the performances, the conferences and the debates. We will be offering the interviews we have held with participants during the entire festival, about changes in narrative styles, innovation in genres and the future of books.

Kosmopolis is a biennial festival, but its programming continues from 22 April next with Liudmila Petrushevskaya, the most prominent Russian writer of the moment, who will present her latest book, Hi havia una vegada una noia que va seduir el marit de la seva germana, i ell es va penjar d’un arbre (There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself), published in Catalan by Edicions del Periscopi. And in May we will be accompanied by Cory Doctorow, Canadian science fiction writer and blogger, and one of the authors read by Edward Snowden in CitizenFour.

Kosmopolis, therefore, does not end here. So we say au revoir to the festival until 2017, but here we carry on with more literature, more narratives and more debates. Which means that the literature fest continues to be amplified.