La Jornada: The authors Brenda Navarro and Dolores Reyes opened the dialogue at the Book and Rose Festival

The 2026 edition of the Book and Rose Festival, which runs from yesterday until April 26, opened yesterday morning. From early on, many young people, some with a map in hand, gathered at the University Cultural Center.

The first talk was given by the Argentine writer Dolores Reyes and the narrator and sociologist Brenda Navarro, who answered the questions of Julia Santibáñez, director of Literature and Promotion of Reading, and Rosa Beltrán, head of the Coordination of Cultural Diffusion.

Reyes said she was interested and moved by “the literature that passes through me, makes me cry and even makes me transform previous ideas; it is a symbolic experience that then drives you to intervene socially in another way.”

The author of the novel Earth Cometer, which was adapted as a television series, as well as its sequel, Misery, He announced that another of his novels will appear next year: “I hope you read it, enjoy it and it moves you.”

He recalled that during his years of teaching in Argentina, with students “who, being very young, had lost a loved one and had very hard lives, they responded with anger, with fury. Underneath it there was enormous sadness, but there is something there that interested me: the pure language, the noun and the verb that hit you in the face.”

For her part, Brenda Navarro commented that she began writing her novel empty houses in 2013, “when a wave of violence hit us all the time,” a phenomenon that dates back to the 70s or even the entire 20th century.”

Navarro said that when he read Earth Eater He realized that just as in empty houses “Our characters do not have names. That seemed very significant to me, because what is happening in Latin America, that women are putting their bodies, suffering violence so that three, four people are enjoying it.”

She expressed her hope that “new writers and generations can use language to play, that they can enjoy when they are playing and that this brings, I don’t know if great and happy responses within society, but joyous questions that allow us to stop normalizing the oppression of women as a systematic state of disappearing us as people.”

In numbers

The Book and Rose Festival 2026 has a budget of 4.2 million pesos, reported Cultura UNAM. In relation to its previous edition, when it registered 50 thousand attendees, it increased by one day to its three days, 13 percent in the number of its stands and went from 398 to 500 activities.

The cost of setting up tents and structures for this book fair at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) was 2.9 million pesos, compared to what was spent on the same item in 2025: 2.4 million pesos. The cost of the artistic programming of the two recent editions was the same: 1.3 million pesos.

Income from module rentals this year increased by 200 thousand pesos compared to 2025, when it stood at 1.2 million pesos. Although the price of each square meter is one thousand pesos, the cost is reduced if more surface area is contracted.