Martín Caparrós , Argentinian journalist and one of the main Ibero-American chroniclers, has talked about his book El hambre (2014) in the third session of the Planeta UAB Lecture Series, an initiative of the Gabinete de Comunicación y Educación aimed at students of its master’s degrees.
This cycle of conferences is part of the project “Planet UAB: The journey to the other – equals in differences” organised by the Gabinete de Comunicación y Educación during the academic year 2020-2021, with the support of the Solidarity Fund of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, which organised a series of activities and awareness-raising actions based on the concept of the UAB campus as a “planet” and which dealt with major issues such as the culture of peace, sustainability, the environment and interculturality, among others.
Students from the Master’s in Travel Journalism, the Master’s in Environmental Communication and the Master’s in Communication and Education participated in this third session with Martín Caparrós, who spoke about his book El hambre (2014). In it, there are three discourses: the chronicles, set in different locations and with different situations in the face of hunger, the essays, of a documentary nature, and some texts, called “The words of the tribe”, which attempt to answer the following question: “How do we manage to live knowing that these things are happening? The author, who launched a new edition of the book in 2021 with updated data, reviewed the different places to which he travelled in the book, such as Niger, Argentina and India, and analysed, from his personal experience, the unequal structure of the food market, coming to the conclusion that “extreme poverty closes the horizons of desire” and that hunger is “one of the great commonplaces of our culture that never becomes a significant problem”.
The author also spoke about the importance of the gaze and of journalism in looking at lives and stories that are different from our own. In El hambre , this gaze, according to the author, resulted in “a chronicle that thinks and an essay that tells”.
Recently the Gabinete de Comunicación y Educación UAB, together with the teachers and students of the tenth edition of the Master in Travel Journalism, have published ‘Maparrós‘ a multimedia cartography about the Argentinean writer.
Martín Caparrós (Buenos Aires, 1957) holds a degree in History. He has lived in Madrid, New York and Barcelona. He is a graphic, radio and television journalist. He has received the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Planeta and Herralde prizes for novels, the Tiziano Terzani and Caballero Bonald prizes for essays, the King of Spain and Moors Cabot prizes for journalism, and the Ítaca Prize 2019. He has published more than thirty books in more than thirty countries, including the novels Sinfín (2020), Un día en la vida de Dios (2001) and the essay El Hambre (2014). He currently writes for Cháchara, his own website.
The writer was awarded the 2019 Ithaca Prize by the Gabinete de Comunicación y Educacióne during the 7th Conference on Communication, Travel and Adventure, for his exemplary journalistic career. His stories have made him a master of Spanish-American journalism. The Argentinean journalist has also been honoured with the King of Spain Award in 1992 for his Crónicas de fin de siglo , with the Planeta Latin America Award in 2004 for Valfierno , with the Herralde Award in 2011 for Los Living , with the Cálamo Extraordinary Award and the Caballero Bonald International Essay Award in 2016 for El Hambre , among many others.
