KEYNOTE ADDRESS + BOOKSIGNING | SPANISH WITH SIMULTANEOUS TRANSLATION TO ENGLISH | SIMULTANEOUS ONLINE TRANSMISSION | Guillermo Arriaga is the author of “Guillotine Squad” and “The Night Buffalo.” He wrote “Amores perros,” “21 grams,” and “Babel,” which earned Oscar, Golden Globe, and Bafta nominations for best original screenplay.

Guillermo Arriaga is the author of the novels Guillotine Squad (1991), A Sweet Scent of Death (1994), The Night Buffalo (1999), El Salvaje (2016), which received the 2017 Premio Mazatlán de Literatura, and was selected in many countries as one of the best novels of the year, and Salvar el fuego, which was awared the 2020 Premio Alfaguara de novela, and the short story collection titled Retorno 201 (2006). His work has been translated into 20 languages.

He wrote Amores perros, 21 grams, and Babel, which earned him Oscar, Golden Globe and Bafta nominations for best original screenplay, and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, which received the 2005 Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Screenplay. In 2008 he made his directorial debut with The Burning Plain. He produced and co-wrote the screenplay for From Afar, which was the first Iberoamerican movie to win the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival. Recently, Arriaga was selected by an international panel as one the 100 best screenwriters of all time.

His most recent novel is titled Extrañas (2023).

“I can’t say, ‘I am going to write a masterpiece,’ or ‘I am going to write a commercial book that will sell thousands and thousands of copies.’ No. In Hollywood you often hear, ‘Of course. He wrote it to win the Oscar.’ ¿How exactly do you do that? If I could truly write something to win the Nobel, I would…”

— Guillermo Arriaga

Narrating Experience

In his keynote address, “Narrating Experience,” Guillermo Arriaga, celebrated screenwriter and author, will discuss how experiences, reading, and imagination, give rise to fictitious elements that allow the reader to find structures to confront their own life experience.