About The Speaker
When And where
Jorge Gárriz Fernández
Jorge Gárriz Fernández was born in Pamplona in 1985 and obtained a degree in BA (Hons) in Fine Arts from the Polytechnic University of Valencia in 2008. Since 2010, he has been based in London, where he completed a Diploma in Event Management at King’s College University. Currently, he is studying a MA in Cultural Management from UNIR University, Logroño.
In 2014, he became involved with the Fringe! Queer Film & Arts Fest, and since 2016 he has been a member of the festival’s programming team, with a particular focus on the promotion of Spanish and Latin American cinema. For the festival’s tenth edition, he co-organised Quiero Queeride – A Virtual Show of Hot Words and Bilingual Bodies, an event bringing together queer writers and poets from Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Spain, the United States, the United Kingdom and Uruguay.
Jorge is a member of the queer artists’ collective Strange Perfume, which is responsible for organising the Strange Perfume Queer Book Art Fair, a fair dedicated to queer publishing and book arts.
The fair has taken place at the South London Gallery in London and at Chetham’s Library in Manchester.
In 2020, Jorge founded Romancero Books, a London-based bookshop specialising in literature published in Spain and Latin America. Within this project, he has curated a series of literary talks focusing on women writers of the Generation of ’27, contemporary short fiction, and the Episodios Nacionales published by Lengua de Trapo. These programmes were developed in collaboration with the Cervantes Institutes in London, Manchester and Leeds and are available online on YouTube.
Jorge is the director of the London Festival of Queer Spanish Culture. Across its fifth editions, the festival hosted writers such as Paco Bezerra, Camila Sosa Villada, Katya Adaui, Luisgé Martín, Eva Baltasar, Pol Guasch, Sara Torres or Alberto Conejero.
More recently, he has organised book presentations and literary events featuring authors including Claudia Piñeiro, Diana Bellessi, Adam Zmith, Bel Olid, Cristina Bendek or María Bastarós and curated events for the National Poetry Library, The Victoria and Albert Museum, and for Instituto Cervantes Los Angeles.