Munir Hachemi (Spain)

Munir Hachemi (b. 1989) is a Spanish writer and translator who has defended a doctoral dissertation on the influence of Jorge Luis Borges’ work on contemporary Spanish literature. In addition to his birthplace, Madrid, he has lived in Granada, Buenos Aires, and Beijing, and speaks Arabic and Chinese among other languages; his mother is Spanish, and his father is of Algerian descent. In 2021, the prestigious Granta magazine selected him as one of the best young Spanish-language novelists.

Munir Hachemi has published both prose and poetry, as well as translations from Chinese into Spanish. His debut novel, Living Things (“Cosas vivas”, 2018), was published in Estonian in 2025 by Toledo Publishing, translated by Klaarika Kaldjärv. It is a playful, (self-)ironic, funny, and fast-paced work, yet simultaneously erudite and literarily ambitious. In the story, bold young characters are forced to face the exploitation of labour in the agricultural sector and the brutal reality of intensive animal and plant farming. The novel is based on the author’s own experience from a summer working on farms in Southern France, after which he permanently gave up meat consumption.

When asked how the festival theme “Artificial and Real” manifests in Living Things, the author replied: “[In the novel, there is] a sort of descending diagram: the bosses do to the workers what the workers do to the animals, and so on. It’s as if animals were the ‘most real,’ the most natural things, if one goes by such a distinction – but the category of ‘realness’ shatters when we think of tens of thousands of chickens crammed into tiny cages, their circadian rhythms controlled by fluorescent lights. If we break down this opposition, we realise that we are more like chickens than we think, and that we only become free by freeing other living beings.”

The theme of real and artificial environments is also strongly present in Hachemi’s short stories and his second novel, The Tree is Coming (“El árbol viene”, 2023). The action of this political and semiotic sci-fi novel takes place in a community settled in space and forgotten there, a unique combination of a high-tech and primitive civilisation.