The Frankfurt Book Fair ended on Sunday with strong attendance and exhibitor figures, with no repeat of last year's political controversies and boycotts, and full of the kind of serendipitous meetings and events that make Americans miss BookExpo.
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| Crowds at the signing tents (photo: Holger Menzel/FBF) |
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Trade visitors increased 9.5%, to 115,000, representing 153 countries (up from 130 in 2023), while exhibitors rose 5%, to 4,300. The Literary Agents & Scouts Centre was fully booked long before the fair, and the Publishers Rights Centre had record occupancy, with a total of 593 tables. Overall attendance for the fair, which includes the public, was 230,000.
Juergen Boos, director of the fair, attributed the gains to the fair's "internationality," which "creates the relevance that we have witnessed in the increased number of participants in all areas.... Collaboration and cooperation are also playing an increasingly important role. The publishing industry is reaching out to its neighbours in the creative industries, and vice versa. Our activities in the area of cross-genre adaptations are becoming more and more important, something that has long been true of the film industry's interest in Frankfurter Buchmesse, and it is increasingly true of the games industry."
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| The fair's popular New Adult area (photo courtesy Frankfurt Book Fair) |
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Karin Schmidt-Friderichs, chairwoman of the Börsenverein, the German publishers and booksellers association, called the fair "the main platform for exchange, networking and doing robust business" and happily noted, "Anyone who could not previously imagine the growing enthusiasm that young people have for reading experienced it impressively at the fair: seeing umpteen thousands of book fans celebrating their favourite books and authors increases the desire for books and their future."
Guest of Honor Italy added flair to the fair, bringing more than 90 authors and hosting a range of events at the fair and elsewhere. Other popular sections and events included Book to Screen Day on Friday, which aimed to help filmmakers find books to adapt, and the inaugural New Adult area, which featured 87 authors who did signings over the weekend for enthusiastic fans.
Several major awards were made in conjunction with the fair. Last Monday, on the eve of the fair, the German Book Prize, honoring the best German novel of the year, was awarded to Hey Guten Morgen, Wie Geht Es Dir? (Hey Good Morning, How Are You?) by Martina Hefter. Karin Schmidt-Friderichs made the announcement and then asked Hefter, "Hey good evening. How are you?"
Judges called the book, about a dancer and performance artist in Leipzig who takes care of her very sick husband during the day and surfs the Internet at night and meets a love scammer (who she scams), "a cleverly choreographed work."
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| Anne Applebaum, winner of the 2024 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. (photo courtesy Frankfurt Book Fair) |
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At a major celebration on Sunday, author and journalist Anne Applebaum received the 2024 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, which had been announced in June. In her speech, she denounced the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014 and full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, saying, "It means the imposition of arbitrary autocratic rule: a state without the rule of law, without guaranteed rights, without accountability, without checks and balances." And she denounced what's happened in Russia, too, particularly "harsher politics inside Russia itself. In the years after the Crimean invasion, opposition was repressed further, independent institutions were completely banned... This deep connection between autocracy and imperial wars of conquest has a logic to it."
She called on Europeans and especially Germans not to waver in their support of Ukraine, saying, "those who advocate 'pacifism,' and those who would surrender not just territory but people, principles and ideals to Russia, have learned nothing from the history of the twentieth century at all... The true lesson of German history [is] not that Germans should never fight, but that Germans have a special responsibility to stand up and take risks for freedom."