Primera Persona 2019 - Session 2: Sally Rooney with Míriam Cano & Julieta Venegas
Autobiographic Live Sessions: Tragicomic Monologues, Pop Music, Theatre and Narrative

The CCCB presents year 8 of Primera Persona, the benchmark festival that brings together creators from various artistic disciplines who base their work on their own life experience. The festival has its eighth outing in 2019, striking a balance of generations and genres, and underlining its three distinguishing characteristics: special proposals by big names, a showcase for new voices, and thematic capsules of subculture, sociocultural phenomena and secret histories of the city, among others.
May 10, Session 2 / 22.00 / CCCB Theatre
Sally Rooney with Míriam Cano / Julieta Venegas
Dublin novelist Sally Rooney opens the festival’s second session. After studying at Trinity College, she became interested in American literature, but she also worked at a restaurant until her debut Conversations with Friends (2017), with its blend of intimacy and ideology, reflections on love and capitalism, that made her the latest name in new international narrative. Rooney was also chosen Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2017. Then came the labels, the most spectacular coming from her publisher, Faber & Faber: “Salinger for the Snapchat generation.” Her second novel, Normal People (2018), has recently won the Costa Novel Award and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. At Primera Persona, she’ll be talking to Catalan poet and columnist Míriam Cano, author of poetry books such as Buntsandstein and Ancoratge.
Language: English and Catalan with simultaneous translation (Catalan)
Closing day one of the festival is the Mexican singer-songwriter Julieta Venegas, who has sold over twelve million records worldwide, but there’s nothing she likes better than holing up with a book under an angle poise in her bedroom. Her photographer parents didn’t let her turn on the television and signed her up at an early age for painting and ballet classes, and she learned classical piano, cello and musical theory, though she soon started listening to Suzanne Vega and David Bowie. And, above all, becoming an intuitive self-taught reader: she started with romantic novels by Corín Tellado, to then see herself reflected in the pages of Jane Eyre. She now lives in Argentina and will be sharing her passion for reading at Primera Persona in the form of recitals and live songs.
Language: Spanish