The guest of honor at Warsaw International Book Fair this week is Italy, and Italy’s publishers have a 200-square-meter pavilion planned.
The guest of honor country at Warsaw this year—following Norway in 2022 and Ukraine in 2023—is Italy. And once more, the Association of Italian Publishers (Associazione Italiana Editori, AIE) is stepping up, in what has to be one of the most demanding years in its history. The public-facing Warsaw International Book Fair, runs Thursday through Sunday (May 23 to 26).
Of course what adds heft to the Italian guest of honor this week in Warsaw, of course, is the fact that Guest of Honor Italy is headed for Frankfurter Buchmesse (October 16 to 20), and is nearing the release of new details about its plans and programming. Warsaw is part of a chain of appearances for Italy that includes Sharjah (2022); Paris (2023); Bucharest (2023); and Tunis (April 2024), all part of the march to Frankfurt, part of “Destination Frankfurt,” a protracted build-up to the October event that’s designed to use book fairs as bully pedestals for Italian literature and publishing.
Innocenzo Cipolletta, president of the Italian publishers’ association, says, “With 481 translation rights sold in 2022, Poland is the third-largest European destination market for Italian publishing. “These are numbers that reflect the historic ties between the two countries and which in the years to come will only grow further thanks to our first participation as a guest country of honor in Warsaw.
“The Polish capital is an important stage in a path toward internationalization, which has seen our country go from 1,800 translation rights agreements made in many parts of the world in 2001 to around 7,900 in 2022, a path which will culminate in 2024 when we’ll be guest of honor in Frankfurt.”
In Warsaw, the Italian presence’s slogan is Ci vuole un fiore, or It Takes a Flower, a line based on a poem of Gianni Rodari.
Luca Franchetti Pardo, the Italian ambassador to Poland—”the deep and inseparable relation between human being, natural environment and the planet.
“It’s about topics that are bound to become a priority in the years to come, and that will require a total commitment for a sustainable and equitable development.”
For further reading: Details of the Italian Presence – Warsaw-book-fair
Article courtesy of: Porter Anderson, Publishing Perspectives
