At the entrance to the 2024 Salone Internazionale del Libro Torino. Image SILT
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
Annalena Benini’s Second Year Directing
Set this year for May 15 to 19, the Salone Internazionale del Libro di Torino has announced details of its programming and plans, with the Netherlands as its guest of honor market.
Just to hit a point of clarification that continues to escape many, the city’s name is Torino, and this is the name officially preferred in Italy. This is why the 2006 Winter Olympic Games were played in “Torino,” not the anglicized “Turin.” (The Taurini, a Celto-Ligurian tribe, were in the River Po area peopled the area as far back as the Iron Age, giving rise eventually to the name Torino.)
Annalena Benini
And the Torino book fair is an interesting example of the trend toward public-facing book events developing “professional program” elements too anchor themselves both in service to their markets and to a bigger publicity footprint—the professional news media read by the book industry can offer more coverage to professionally engaged fairs than they can to the basic “book festival” format which targets consumers as its patrons.
For a second year, the Salone is under the direction of Annalena Benini, who had a much-praised outing in 2024, her first turn at being in the top seat.
Roughly 137,000 Square Feet
At the 2024 Salone Internazionale del Libro Torino. Image SILT
This year’s fair is expected to comprise some 137,000 square meters (1.5 million square feet), with more than 700 stands, 51 venues for presentations and events, and some 220 hours of workshops. There are also to be nearly 2,000 events on-site and some 500 off-site in what’s called the “Salone Off” program, the sort of outreach efforts that many fairs are good at making to their local communities. This year, the venues will include the 18,000-seat auditorium at the Lingotto Congress Center.
The Torino fair is also blessed with an ethos of earnest publicity and communication, forthrightly calling itself “Italy’s largest public-facing fair looking forward to opening its doors to publishers, authors, and, above all, readers.”
This is healthy. It is, after all, the groundwork of the industry to get books into the hands of consumers, and the “professional program” trend—along with the trend of calling everything “international”—can easily mislead some event organizers to stress the professional programming over the critically important nature of this type of consumer-oriented event.
The theme of this 37th year of the Salone del Libro is Words Fall Lightly Between Us. That phrase is used as a tribute to novelist Lalla Romano, who died in 2001 at age 94. Romano had been inspired by the work of poet Eugenio Montale (1895 to 1981).
Yasmina Reza
At the fair, the French writer and playwright Yasmina Reza is expected to lead an event making the theme official.
Another feature this year is a “romance pop-up,” a space said to be “dedicated to meet-and-greet activities with names in the romance genre, adding 11 extra venues.
A new Publishers Center is to open this year, described as a lounge area in which one-on-one meetings will be held between publishers, booksellers, and/or “influencers.”
While the Netherlands is guest country of honor, the southern Italian administrative region Campañia is to be “guest region,” an area perhaps best known for its stunning Amalfi Coast.
The title of the Dutch guest of honor program is The Discovery of Holland, from the novel by Jan Brokken (Iperborea). Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, a bestselling author translated into more than 20 languages and a protagonist of the intellectual life of the Netherlands, is also to be in Torino, with his latest novel Alcibiade (Ponte alle Grazie), in conversation with Christian Greco, director of the Egyptian Museum in Torino.
Torino’s rights center, open from May 14 to 16, is designed to offer three days for buying and selling editorial and audiovisual rights. Engaged in that area are to be publishers, scouts, literary and film agencies, and production companies.
Of a reported 414 applications for the fellowship supported by ITA, the Italian Trade Agency, 70 fellows will participate in the activities promoted by the rights center.
The fellows will be hosted at the headquarters of the Torino Film Commission for an in-depth meeting on the themes of audiovisual adaptation, to help strengthen ties between the Salone and the city’s film commission—and, hopefully, to encourage more development to screen from books.
Located very near the Salone del Libro area, the rights center also offers international publishing professionals access an exhibition on Italian editorial production.
The Aficionado Award
Again this year, the Torino program includes its three-year partnership on the Aficionado Award with Frankfurter Buchmesse (October 15 to 19), that being an honor “to recognize and pay tribute to the people, companies, and initiatives which innovate and impress in original collaboration.”
This international accolade, conceived and founded by Michael Gaeb, Tom Kraushaar, Rebecca Servadio, and Aleksi Siltala, intends to reward the most original and stimulating editorial initiatives globally.
In 2023, the award went to Lola Shoneyin of Aké Arts and Festival (Nigeria), while the 2024 edition was won by the Brazilian poetry promotion initiative Circulo de Poemas.
This year, the three candidates will present their projects to an audience of publishing “aficionados” on the opening day of the rights center:
- The independent publishing house Seagull (Calcutta)
- La Disparition, (Marseille), an epistolary medium about things that are disappearing
- ZoraLIT (Berlin), an association of literary pros.
The presentation ceremony of the finalists will be held as usual on the opening day of the rights center, at the Lingotto Congress Center on May 24 at 5 p.m. CEST.
L’Autoreinvisibile in Its 25th Iteration
In the 2024 rights center at the Salone Internazionale del Libro Torino. Image SILT
“The Invisible Author” is a series of events on literary translated curated again this year—its 25th—by Ilide Carmignani a master lecture by Georgi Gospodinov, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the European Strega Prize, and the International Booker Prize in 2023 for Time Shelter.
The Torino fair also has a new site, and quite agreeably, it’s led by a graphic that includes both male and female interest, a break from many contemporary instances of book-world marketing visuals that emphasize women and reading, often without even a fleeting reference to boys and/or men.
As you may recall, the Torino Salone drew more than 220,000 visitors last year, and hosted what it reported to be some 4,300 professional meetings.
You’ll find information on this year’s fair updating regularly at that new site.
Image: From the new site for the Salone Internazionale del Libro di Torino
More from us on the Torino International Book Fair is here, more on international book fairs and trade shows overall is here, more on the Aficionado Award is here, more on Guest of Honor Italy at Frankfurt this year is here, and more on Frankfurter Buchmesse is here.
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