A list of convened with 75% of authors who write in Spanish and 25% who do so in the other official languages of the state. The Minister of Culture, Miquel Iceta, and the president of the Frankfurt Book Fair, Juergen Boss, presented today at the Goethe Institute in Madrid the program (and the list of writers) with which Spain presents itself at the most world (Frankfurt, in October), as a guest country.
Irene Vallejo and Antonio Muñoz Molina will be in charge of delivering the opening speech. Elvira Marco, curator of the Spanish program, explains that there will be 175 people invited (including publishers and booksellers) and about 400 publishers present. There will be two tributes, to the agent Carmen Balcells (1930-2015) and the editor Jorge Herralde, and the disappeared Carlos Ruiz Zafón and Almudena Grandes will be remembered.
Among the guest writers are representatives of all currents, languages and generations: Enrique Vila-Matas, Arturo Pérez Reverte, Rosa Montero, Fernando Aramburu, Kiko Amat, Najat El Hachmi, Marta Sanz, Javier Cercas, Sara Mesa, Patricio Pron, Isaac Rosa, Elvira Lindo, Sergio Vila-Sanjuán, Jesús Carrasco, Elena Medel, Cristina Fernández Cubas, Juan José Millás, Julia Navarro, Santiago Posteguillo, María Dueñas, Ray Loriga, Dolores Redondo, Elia Barceló, María Sánchez, Elisabeth Duval, Sergio del Molino, Miqui Otero, Lara Moreno, José Carlos Llop and Vicente Molina Foix. In Catalan, Marta Orriols, Sergi Pàmies, Carme Riera, Marina Garcés, Maria Barbal and Anna Ballbona. In Basque, Bernardo Atxaga. In Galician, Manuel Rivas or Xesús Fraga. And, in Asturian, Xuan Bello.
The total budget of the program is 12 million euros. One of them is destined for the construction of the 2,000 square meter pavilion, baptized as 'the cherry pavilion' and animated with artificial intelligence techniques that will transform its appearance on a daily basis.
In a packed press conference at the Goethe Institute in Madrid, with a large presence of German journalists, the writer Irene Vallejo, author of 'Infinity in a Junco', one of the latest publishing phenomena that has crossed borders, evoked her readings of German authors and said that "through what we read, we are the only animal that knows what the world was like before its birth".
Daniel Fernández, president of the Spanish publishers, recalled the 1991 edition, in which Spain was also invited. "Thirty-one years later, Spain has changed a lot. Over the years, we have gone from being a country that was basically going to buy rights to also being one of the big sellers."
