Instituto Cervantes Manchester celebrates International Week of Literature in Spanish with Benengeli 2026 — this year dedicated to the theme of Libraries.

The Instituto Cervantes Manchester is once again taking part in this global celebration of literature, which brings together readers, writers and lovers of the written word across five continents.

This year’s festival invites audiences to explore the role of libraries in literature, the collective imagination and contemporary literary creation. In Manchester, we will host an in-person conversation at one of the city’s most iconic spaces, Manchester Central Library, with two leading voices in Spanish-language literature: Santiago Roncagliolo and Marta Barrio, in dialogue moderated by Lucy Popescu.

The conversations will be held in English.

About the Festival:

Benengeli, the literary festival of the Cervantes Institute, reaches its sixth edition.

As a reference within the Spanish language, its face-to-face and digital activities will be developed for a week on the five continents, making it a unique and global phenomenon.

It should be noted that the Benengeli 2026 will have the library space as its thematic axis. That splendid place within which the memory of humanity is preserved, access to knowledge is democratized and linked communities are consolidated around the mystery of speech, information and dialogue.

A form of paradise, as Borges imagined, which is usually a frequent reason in the life and work of many writers who understand real or imaginary libraries, their own or public libraries as the place of imagination, Thirteen are the cities of the network of the Cervantes Institute that this year will be part of this great meeting that will bring together prominent voices from the literary world in Spanish. Landscape where the aesthetic and generational plurality develops with which literature in our language approaches the reality of this century.

Sydney, Manila, Brussels, Bordeaux, Madrid, Manchester, Paris, Oran Dakar, Belo Horizonte, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles will be the scene of these virtual and face-to-face meetings, to which Caguas, Caracas, Edinburgh and Quito will be added as guest cities. This great global circuit also includes multimedia activities carried out by collaborators in the cities of Prague, Seville, Bogotá, Panama City and Miami; forming as a whole a large mosaic of letters. In this way, Benengeli raises his proposal to consolidate a large global cultural network in which a melting pot of literary cultures fits, as a spiritual library.

More than 100 guests will explore the relationship that the literary develops with the universe of the Libraries in a journey towards that personal and collective imagination in which books are a sign of recognition of the other, of growth towards human intimacy.

Benengeli, the only literary festival that runs on the 5 continents, welcomes you.