Spanish
With good sales expectations and a strong emphasis on "the vitality" of Spanish in the United States, the 84th edition of the Madrid Book Fair kicked off this Friday, which aims to improve the eleven million euros in turnover and more than a million visitors it had last year.
"We face it with renewed optimism because reading figures have grown a lot in recent years and also sales figures, the feeling we have is that this is going to be a good fair," Daniel Fernández, president of the Federation of Publishers' Guilds of Spain (FGEE), told EFE.
However, shortly after Queen Letizia made the inaugural tour in the Retiro Park, the city council of the Spanish capital announced the closure of the enclosure, and therefore of the fair, from six o'clock in the afternoon, due to a wind gust warning of up to 55 kilometers per hour. The reopening will take place, predictably, tomorrow Saturday.
More than fifteen days ahead to visit the 365 booths of bookstores and publishing houses, six more than last year, through which thousands of authors will parade until June 15 to meet their readers and sign copies.
Although in 2010 there was a rather sharp drop in the consumption and sales of books in Spain, afterwards, and especially as a result of the pandemic, there has been a rapid recovery in copies sold, although not in turnover, according to Fernández.
"Publishers have sacrificed margins and prices have been contained for a long time and continue to be contained," he assured. So far this year, according to the data handled by the federation, the feeling is that "the Spanish book market continues to grow."
New York and the vitality of Spanish in the United States
With the slogan 'New York illuminates the fair', the city of skyscrapers will be the main protagonist of this edition, which will feature the visit of American authors such as Vivian Gornick, Junot Díaz, Katie Kitamura, Teju Cole, or Rebecca Solnit.A special emphasis will be placed on the Hispanic literary tradition of New York, where three out of ten inhabitants have Spanish as their mother tongue, and Hispanic writers with strong connections to that city will attend, such as the Spaniards Eduardo Lago and Kirmen Uribe, the Argentinian María Negroni, or the Mexican Brenda Navarro.
The director of the Book Fair, Eva Orúe, has recalled that although the choice of New York as the common thread of this edition predated Trump's arrival in the presidency, in these circumstances it has acquired "a different dimension". "Spanish wouldn't say it's threatened because the vitality of the Latino community in the United States is brutal and also in the world of literature and publishing, but it obviously faces some dangers," he stated.In this regard, she recalled that the Dominican writer Rita Indiana, one of the coordinators of the program, has not been able to travel to Madrid from the United States due to her university's recommendation not to leave the country because of the risk of losing her visas.
