The Instituto Cervantes in Manchester is once again taking part in Benengeli 2025: Semana Internacional de las Letras en Español. We invite you to join us in this global celebration of literature, which brings together readers, writers, and lovers of the written word from across five continents. This year’s festival theme is “Writing with the Five Senses”, an invitation to explore how sensory perception shapes contemporary literary creation. Get ready for an exciting week filled with in-person and online activities, all designed to delve into this profound aspect of the writing process. Don’t miss the in-person event in Manchester: a conversation between two prominent voices in Spanish literature, Mercedes Cebrián and Xesús Fraga, moderated by Professor H. Rosi Song. About the authors: Mercedes Cebrián was born in Madrid. She writes fiction, essays and poetry and translates literature from English and French into Spanish. Her newest book is the essay Estimada clientela [ ] (Siruela, 2025). Her writing has been published in newspapers such as El País and La Vanguardia, and journals and magazines such as Poetry London and The Indian Quarterly. Her literary universe explores, among other aspects of reality, the emotional ties humans develop with objects and food. She has been a writing fellow at the Spanish Academy in Rome, and a writer in residence at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation (Italy). She holds MAs in Spanish and Latin American Studies from Birkbeck (University of London) and from the University of Pennsylvania. Xesús Fraga was born in 1971 in London, where his family had migrated from Galicia. This biographical experience lies at the heart of his book Virtudes (e misterios) [Virtues [and Mysteries)], which in 2021 won Spain's National Book Award for Narrative. He has worked nearly thirty years as a journalist for La Voz de Galicia, mainly in its Arts pages. He has also translated into Galician or Spanish authors such as Barnes, Nabokov, Plath, Orwell, Kerouac, Defoe and Dahl, among others. H. Rosi Song is professor of Hispanic studies at Durham University specialising in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Spanish culture and literature. She is the author of Lost in Transition: Constructing Memory in Contemporary Spain (Liverpool University Press, 2016) and the co-editor of Towards a Cultural Archive of la Movida: Back to the Future (Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). Her book, co-written with Anna Riera, A Taste of Barcelona: The History of Catalan Cooking and Eating (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019), received the North American Catalan Society Award for Outstanding Work in the Field of Catalan Studies in 2021. She is the PI of a recently awarded Horizon Europe Pillar II grant on food culture and recipes, RELISH, Reframing European Gastronomy Legacy through Innovation, Sustainability and Heritage. She serves as co-editor for the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, a member of the editorial collective of Gastronomica. The Journal of Food Studies, and co-editor of the series Culinaria: Food for Thought, Food for Pleasure, Food for Change for The University of Toronto Press. She also serves on the editorial board of Catalan Review, Journal of Catalan Studies, and the Toronto Iberic series.