The Cabildo de Tenerife has organised the third Reading Club Meeting to take place on Thursday the 7th at 6:00 pm in Auditorio de Tenerife’s Sala de Cámara. Participants at the forum include writers Sara Mesa (Madrid, 1976), Selena Millares (Las Palmas, 1963), Bruno Mesa (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 1975), and Daniel Bernal (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 1984), who will also moderate the exchanges between the authors and the readers of the Cabildo de Tenerife’s collective loan service for reading clubs which includes the Red Insular de Bibliotecas Públicas Municipales [Municipal Public Libraries Network], Biblioteca Pública del Estado [State Public Library], day centres for the elderly, and teachers associations, among others.

Admission is free and invites can be obtained at Auditorio de Tenerife box office on the day of the event. The meeting aims to be an encouragement to people who take part in the different activities organised by reading clubs throughout the year. At the event, the authors will deal with topics related to their experience and participation in reading clubs, and their literary works. They will also choose one of their own novels that they understand would suit a reading club.

Sara Mesa was shortlisted for the Premio Herralde de Novela for her novel Cuatro por cuatro and won the Premio El Ojo Crítico de Narrativa for Cicatriz, a work that was picked for book of the year by newspapers El País, El Mundo, ABC, El Español and other media. Her last work, Cara de pan, is a short novel that has been described as “disturbing” as there is no doubt one feels disturbed for quite a while after reading it.

Selena Millares has written books of poems, essays and has published two novels. The first one, El faro y la noche, earned her the Antonio Machado international award in 2014. La isla del fin del mundo, her second novel, also received good reviews, both for the topics and conflicts it deals with and the ways she solves them.

Bruno Mesa is the author of the books of poems El laboratorio (2000), El libro de Fabio Montes (2010) and Testigos de cargo (2015), in addition to the short story collection Ulat y otras ficciones (2007), the novel El hombre encuadernado (2010), the book of essays Argumentos en busca de autor (2009) and the Roman diary No guardes nada en tus bolsillos (2015). He has won the Loewe Foundation International Young Poets Award, Premio Internacional de Relato Breve Julio Cortázar and the Valle-Inclán Scholarship for literary creation by the Academia de España in Rome.

Daniel Bernal has won, among others, the Ciudad de Tacoronte poetry award (2008), the Luis Feria (2011) and Pedro García Cabrera (2013) poetry awards. He has published the books of poems Escolio con fuselaje estival (2011), Corporeidad (2012), Odiana (2014) and El tiempo de los lémures (2014), plus the microstory collection Manual de crucificciones (2019). He is the director of the La Salamandra Ebria magazine.

The Cabildo has a system of collective loans for reading clubs in which there are 47 groups from different public libraries, day centres for the elderly and educational and cultural associations currently registered. A reading club is made up by 10 to 20 people and its aim is to provide a new approach to reading. Shared reading, where different ideas about the same text are discussed, lead to mutual enrichment through the contributions of each participant. Reading clubs include people connected to different bodies, institutions and associations who take care of managing this cultural activity.  At weekly meetings, the club members discuss their impressions on a specific book, which they all read at the same pace under the supervision of a person acting as moderator.