We will be holding the sixteenth edition between 9 and 20 October. Most of the 2025 programme will take place in Sala BBK and Bizkaia Aretoa – EHU, our usual main venues, which this year will be joined by Sala Bilborock and the Bidebarrieta Library as new venues for the festival.
As in previous editions, the programme will host the most interesting authors, among which there will be an outstanding international presence. The full programme will be unveiled in mid-September, but here is a preview of the main theme and some of its protagonists.
New York as the programme’s main theme and in Javier Jaén’s poster
In 2025 we will be traveling to New York, and not by chance. This year the city celebrates three anniversaries that are close to our spirit: fifty years of ‘Saturday Night Live’ (the birthplace of comedy legends such as Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray, Tina Fey and Will Ferrell), the centenary of ‘The Great Gatsby’ – Scott Fitzgerald’s satire that turned New York into the stage of the American Dream – and especially,one hundred years of ‘The New Yorker’, the magazine that turned irony into an art form and proved that the best stories are born from a mixture of humour, literature and quality journalism.
Javier Jaén for Ja! 2025
The themes and protagonists of the next edition will be connected to the city of skyscrapers, and not only as a physical place. New York will be above all an emotional landscape at the festival: an imaginary made up of books, films, comics and other artistic works that are part of the universal heritage. All wrapped up in a unique combination of humour and melancholy that could be called ‘New York State of Mind’.
The poster for the 16th edition is once again a piece of art by graphic artist Javier Jaén, who once again combines the essence of the festival with the topic that focuses on it this time. It does so through a New York yellow-taxi background on which emerges an amusingly ferocious King Kong, drawn with a dotted pattern reminiscent of both classic cinema and the newspapers of the golden age of New York journalism.
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