By DPA
Frankfurt : When the world’s biggest annual trade fair devoted to books begins Oct 10 in the German city of Frankfurt, a fresh crop of up-and-coming writers will be introduced to publishers from round the globe.
This year, 7,300 exhibitors from 110 nations will attend the Frankfurt Book Fair, hoping to sell foreign rights for everything from school textbooks and calendars to poetry anthologies.
Deals on translation and re-publishing rights as well as printing contracts and bulk book sales are negotiated during the fair.
Introducing an author to a potential publishing client, perhaps from China or Brazil, can often help to clinch a deal.
Chinese representation at the Fair, with 160 publishers, has shot up by 30 percent in terms of stand space, reflecting rising spending on books in China.
The rapid expansion of education in such emergent economies promises a growing market for textbooks and literature, a godsend to publishers at a time when book sales in the West are static.
Amid so much good writing, it can be hard to rise above the crowd.
Every year the fair selects one country or region as “special guest,” creating an opportunity for the guests to take stock of their own contemporary literature and set up a cultural display in Frankfurt.
This year the focus will be on the Catalan culture centred in the northeast of Spain.
The Catalans, who speak and write their own language, will highlight writers living and dead who offer a window for outsiders into their unique world and turbulent history. About 130 authors, mostly Spain-based, will attend the Fair.
The choice has proved controversial in Spain, where some see the assertiveness of the Catalans as a threat to national unity. Catalan is also spoken in the tiny country of Andorra and in some towns of southern France.
For Germany, as host nation, the fair is also an annual high point, with a principal prize for German novelists to be awarded Oct 8, two days before the fair begins, and a world award for authors to be handed over on the fair’s last day, Oct 14.
Six novels have made it to the short list for the first of these awards, the German Book Prize, which honours younger German writers.
The winner of the second award, the German Book Trade Peace Prize, has already been announced.
It will go to the Israeli historian Saul Friedlaender, 74, who has written an authoritative two-volume account of Nazi Germany’s persecution of the Jews.
The Frankfurt fair, founded in 1949, now entirely fills six huge pavilions at the city fairgrounds.
Exhibitors have booked 170,000 square metres of stand space this year and any further expansion would require its division into theme areas to be completely re-jigged.
The Book Fair, which is a business venture of the Boersenverein, Germany’s association of publishers and booksellers, is contracted to stay in the city till 2010 and talks have begun on a renewal beyond that.
The event’s chief executive, Juergen Boos, said the fair would remain in the city.
Fair spokeswoman Caroline Vogel said complaints in the past about the high price of hotel rooms in the city had diminished since the opening of several new city hotels last year.
“Accommodation here is no dearer than it would be in London,” she said.