Cipolletta: "In Frankfurt we bring forward-looking and plural publishing industry: in the official delegation authors who write for more than 50 publishing houses."
The curtain rises on the Frankfurter Buchmesse 2024 where Italy is a protagonist: from Wednesday to Sunday 88 writers from the official Italy Guest of Honour delegation, plus even more invited by German publishers, will enliven the halls and booths of the world's first fair dedicated to books and the buying and selling of rights. To take advantage of the opportunities offered by the world's most important book fair, more than 230 Italian exhibitors including publishing houses, literary agents and other companies will be present, of which 131 will be hosted in the Italian Collective Stand (Hall 5.0) organized by ITA – Italian Trade Agency in collaboration with the Italian Publishers Association (Associazione Italiana Editori - AIE).
"From Wednesday the spotlight will be on writers, publishers and all the professionals in the Italian book world: they will be the ones to tell and promote a cultural industry that is solid, innovative, fourth in Europe in terms of sales value and that, above all else, is an engine of freedom and cultural growth outside and inside the country," explained AIE President Innocenzo Cipolletta. “Since 2001 to date, Italy has more than quadrupled the translation rights sold abroad each year and we will grow again: the Italy Guest of Honour literary program that we curated with the consultancy of Ex Libris, as well as the program of professional meetings focuses on a publishing industry projected into the future, which explores new genres, launches new authors and literary phenomena, and tackles the great technological knots of the present, starting with the defense of copyright in the age of Artificial Intelligence."
Italy will be in the spotlight as early as Tuesday evening at the opening of the Buchmesse (5 p.m., Congress Center Messe Frankfurt) in which writers Carlo Rovelli, Susanna Tamaro and Stefano Zecchi will participate for our country along with Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli. This will be followed by the inauguration of the Guest of Honor Italy Pavilion (Forum 1), where Extraordinary Commissioner Mauro Mazza will speak. On Wednesday, on the other hand, the Italian Collective Stand, curated by the Italian Trade Agency in collaboration with AIE, will be inaugurated at 10:30 a.m., where the 21-meeting professional program will be held, with Italian and German Ministers of Culture Alessandro Giuli and Claudia Roth, Ambassador of Italy to the Federal Republic of Germany Armando Varricchio, Italian Trade Agency General Director, ambassador Lorenzo Galanti, AIE President Innocenzo Cipolletta, and Frankfurter Buchmesse Director Juergen Boos.
The Italian publishing industry, according to data from the Report on the State of Publishing in Italy by the AIE Research Office, has a sales value of 3.439 billion in 2023, 5,308 active publishers, more than 70 thousand employees, including allied industries. Compared to 1988, when it was for the first time Guest of Honour, the market has more than doubled, adjusted for inflation. There were 85,192 books published in the past year and 7,838 rights sold abroad, including 2,325 children's and young adult titles, 1,951 fiction titles, 1,420 general non-fiction titles and 985 specialized non-fiction titles.
"Behind these numbers is a plural and diverse publishing offer that will be largely represented in Frankfurt: the Italy Guest of Honour delegation is made up of 88 authors who have written for more than 50 publishing brands, large groups, medium-sized publishers, small ones," Cipolletta recalls. "There is fiction, non-fiction, comics, children's books, illustrations, poetry. The detective stories and romance that have dominated the sales charts in recent years, the great family sagas. We will have with us nine Strega Prize winners, the most established writers as well as emerging authors, the essayists who have popularized history and science in our country, the illustrators who are best known today and those who will be in the near future. It is a program about an ambitious country that has stories, images and ideas to share with the world."
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