Penguin Random House chief executive Markus Dohle will kick off the Frankfurt Book Fair with the keynote speech at the opening press conference on Tuesday, October 10. Juergen Boos, director of the Frankfurt Book Fair, and Heinrich Riethmueller, president of the German Publishers & Booksellers Association, will also speak. Last year, artist David Hockney gave the opening press conference.
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Carolyn Reidy and Guillaume Dervieux, heads of Simon & Schuster and Albin Michel, respectively, will be the featured speakers at this year's annual CEO Talk. Reidy has led S&S worldwide since 2008, while Dervieux has been head of Albin Michel, a French publishing house more than 100 years old, since 2012. The talk will highlight "strategic developments in international publishing" and take place on Wednesday, October 11, at 2 p.m.
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Fred Kobrak, the former president of Collier Macmillan International and longtime international sales executive who died last December at the age of 88, will be honored with a memorial reception on October 11. Kobrak attended the Frankfurt Book Fair for 56 years in a row, and to carry on Kobrak's legacy, his family will sponsor the Fred Kobrak Frankfurt Fellow Grant for the next 10 years, which will cover the cost for one publishing professional to take part in the annual Frankfurt Fellowship.
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The European and International Booksellers Association is hosting its second annual daylong conference at the Frankfurt Book Fair for booksellers and booksellers association heads. The conference, which is entitled "Creative and Innovative Solutions by Bookshops and Booksellers Associations," will take place on October 12 and feature two main sessions called "The best things I have done in my bookshop" and "The best things my booksellers association has done," along with a special roundtable discussion with Francophone Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou (Memoirs of a Porcupine) and Susanne König, executive director of Powerhouse Arena and Powerhouse on 8th, in Brooklyn, N.Y. (König is the first recipient of the Frankfurt Buchmesse U.S. Booksellers Prize, which included a trip to the book fair.)