Barcelona wears black

From 3 to 13 February, Barcelona will host the 17th edition of the BCNegra, the city's crime noir festival. Promoted by the Institut de Cultura (ICUB), curated by Carlos Zanón and with the slogan Aquí, demà (Here, tomorrow), the festival will be entirely in person and will be attended by nearly 170 participants, including 112 authors from the national and international literary scene. There will be more than 40 round tables, theatre and literary routes, cinema, music, a poetry slam and even a gastronomic pairing. During the event, the Pepe Carvalho Award, this year going to American writer Don Winslow, will be handed out. This ceremony will be held on 10 February in the Saló de Cent of the City Hall and will be presided by the City Mayor, Ada Colau. Two days later, there will be a conversation between Don Winslow and journalist Toni García Ramon.

Although there will be activities in different parts of the city, the epicentre of BCNegra will be the Teatre l'Aliança del Poblenou, an emblematic venue opened in 1869. In addition to the theatre, another venue that will carry a lot of weight will be El Molino in El Paral·lel, a building with many decades of history. The event's launch will be on Thursday, 3 February, at the Jaume Fuster Library. On the same day, the exhibition Expedient González Ledesma will open, in memory of one of the best chroniclers that literature has produced, whether at hands of the commissioner Méndez or the lawyer Silver Kane. Later, Enric González Torralba, Victoria González Torralba, Joaquim Roglan Llop and Jordi Sierra i Fabra will talk about the writer, the characters and his work in general. You can visit the exhibition until 2 April.

In each edition, the festival brings back a different author, a book and a character. This time, they will be the British Ted Lewis, Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, and Petra Delicado, a character by the writer Alicia Giménez Barlett who is part of Barcelona's literary imagination. In addition, BCNegra wants to pay tribute to two pioneering writers of this genre in Spain, Francisco González and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, and their respective alter egos, the police commissioner Ricardo Méndez and the private detective Pepe Carvalho, on the 50th anniversary of their creation.

Eduardo Mendoza, Elena Medel, Carmen Mola, Dominique Manotti, Gerard Guix, Alan Parks, Toni Hill, María Oruña, Jordi Ledesma, Núria Biendicho, Tura Soler, Sergio Ramírez, Kiko Amat, Charles Cumming, Chris Whitaker, Màrius Serra o Håkan Nesser are just some of the authors who will take part in BCNegra, in an edition that will deal with many themes: humour in crime novels, the family secrets we carry, racist crimes, marginal characters, disappearances, and so on. It should also be noted that the online film platform Filmin will collaborate with the festival by broadcasting 10 films. The BCNegra 2022 poster is the work of cartoonist and illustrator Pep Brocal.

You can find all the details of the festival through this link.