Barcelona already has the ticket to travel to Mexico. In 2025, the Catalan capital will be the guest at the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL), the second largest in the world only behind Frankfurt and the largest meeting in the publishing world in Spanish.
This was announced this Tuesday by the mayor of the city, Jaume Collboni, at a press conference in the Saló de Cent del Ayuntamiento, together with the general director of the FIL, Marisol Schulz; the councilor for Culture and Creative Industries, Xavier Marcé; and the deputy mayor of the Área de Economía, Hacienda, Promoción Económica y Turismo, Jordi Valls.
"Barcelona wants to fully exercise its Spanish and Catalan capital status and its status as a bridge with Latin America and Europe," said the mayor, Jaume Collboni, through a screen, since he is unwell due to covid. "We already said that a transversal priority of the municipal government would be to recover the entire cultural mission that made this city great" and position Barcelona as "the publishing capital of Spain and the Latin American sphere that it is today. Our participation in the fair represents the most ambitious exhibition for the dissemination of our authors and editorials that we have ever done from here.
Collboni thanked Mexico for its welcome, "a friendly and brother country that has historically been a welcoming land for writers" and recalled "Barcelona as the capital of the Latin American boom." "Now we want all that creative, industrial and cultural potential to also be experienced and shared in Latin America. The city intends to explode a Barcelona and literary boom" in Mexico, "encourage translations into Spanish of authors in Catalan and encourage conditions and improve the constitution of Catalan publishing houses as never before.
The mayor has announced that the figure of a commissioner will be created to define and specify the contents of Barcelona's presence in the FIL, as well as a city promoter group where public-private collaboration with representatives of civil society is highlighted. .
The city will take the baton from the European Union and Spain, protagonists in 2023 and 2024 of a fair that will be held for the first time without the presence of its founder and president, Raúl Padilla, who died last April, and that will take place on November 25 to December 3. Padilla himself gave his approval for Barcelona to be the guest of honor, as Schulz has acknowledged.
"It is a project that has been developing little by little. It does not come out of nowhere. In the Barcelona REACT forum they talked about the economic importance of this city and its links with Latin America. In that context, the idea arose that it could be the next guest of honor. It all started in an informal way but it quickly had the approval of the Catalan and Barcelona editors. Last July, with Collboni we made a concrete proposal and this comes to fruition today," applauded the director general of the fair, which remembers "with great affection" the Catalan presence in 2004. "The presence of the guest country is always remembered."
The closest that Barcelona came to this world meeting was precisely this year, under the umbrella of Catalonia as guest of honor. This time she will do it alone and will have the opportunity for nine days to fill the Mexican city with her literature, music, art, cinema and theater.
Without neglecting its vocation as a business meeting, the FIL was conceived as a cultural festival in which literature is the backbone, with a program in which authors from all continents and different languages participate, as well as a space for academic discussion of the great issues that cross our current times. In 2022, a total of 49 countries were represented and 806,805 people, 14,197 book professionals and more than 2,000 publishers participated.
