Two new exhibitions from the Bologna Children’s Book Fair will be on display at the China Shanghai International Book Fair, marking the 700th anniversary of Marco Polo’s death and the sixth year in which the Bologna show’s team is collaborating with the Shanghai fair organizers to create a jointly mounted book fair and professional program, November 15 to 17. Images: BCBF
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
Marco Polo Sails Again
As you may know, show director Donna Chai’s 11th edition of the China Shanghai International Children’s Book Fair is set to run November 15 to 17, and it’s a collaborative productron, for a sixth year, with Elena Pasoli‘s Bologna Children’s Book Fair (BCBF, March 31 to April 3). Both the main Bologna fair and Jacks Thomas‘ Bologna Book Plus are part of what’s seen at Shanghai, and the Italian co-organizing connection has been in place since 2018.
With Shanghai’s growing prominence in the field (this year anticipating 450 exhibitors at this public-facing fair with an international professional program), and you can learn more about that in our article here, it’s interesting to know that special events will be dedicated to Marco Polo (on the 700th anniversary of his death in Venice, in 1324).
Two new exhibitions have been designed specifically to celebrate the relationship with China.
The key presentation is Marco Polo. Traveller, Merchant, Storyteller, and that one comes together thanks to a selection of international titles for children and young people curated by Giannino Stoppani Cooperativa Sociale of the Accademia Drosselmeier—a longtime and honored collaborator with the 60-year-old Bologna fair in many of its many exhibition efforts.
That show is expected to “guide visitors to explore—on the occasion of the 700th anniversary of his death—the legendary life of the great traveller, merchant and storyteller who was the first to act as a bridge between Italy and China, thus celebrating the bond that has linked the two cultures for centuries.”
‘Chinese Excellence in Children’s Illustration,’ a new series of exhibitions organized by BolognaFiere, China South Publishing & Media Group, and Sidee Cultural Communication, will present a second edition next week at the Shanghai fair.
Accompanying the exhibition will be the lectio magistralis, or master class, Marco Polo’s Description of the World and its Readers: A Travel Account Mistaken for a Fantasy Book on November 16 at the Shanghai fair at 10 a.m. in the conference room, Alessandro Barbero explaining how Polo’s travel diary has become a true work of legendary fantasy for future generations. That event is chaired by Ivan Canu, an illustrator and the director of Mimaster Illustration, and is to include an opening address by Elena Pasoli, the Bologna fair director, and Francesco D’Arelli, who directs the Italian Cultural Institute in Shanghai.
What’s more, Chinese Excellence in Children’s Illustration, a new series of exhibitions organized by BolognaFiere, China South Publishing & Media Group, and Sidee Cultural Communication, will present a second edition next week. Replicating the successful format of Italian Excellence (which held its fourth edition in 2023 and was successfully presented in more than 50 countries during several international tours), Chinese Excellence aims to showcase the talents of Chinese illustration by presenting a selection of the best illustrations by both well-known and unpublished contemporary artists each year, selected by a jury composed of Chinese and international publishing and illustration experts.
The finalists of the selection are presented at CCBF, while the winners, and the exhibition displaying their illustrations, will feature in Bologna.
At the Shanghai book fair’s annual Golden Pinwheel illustration competition show, in 2018. Image: CCBF
The other key event relative to Polo in all this is called Bridging Worlds: A Live Painting Tribute to Marco Polo, to be featured on November 15 at 12:30 p.m. in the “Illustrators Survival Corner” area—a programming feature transported from Bologna–featuring international illustrators, authors and artists.
Still another exhibition moving from Italy to China is called A Fabulous Wardrobe. Fashion, Clothing and Threads in Children’s Picture Books. Aided by the patronage of the University of Bologna’s Rimini Campus, the exhibition is divided into six sections, with a total of 150 books from 21 countries featuring children’s publishing from all over the world.
The idea is to highlight “the traces of embroidery and explore patterns that take on surprising shapes and ever-changing identities, investigating the relationship between childhood and clothing, between dressing and being dressed, evoking real and imagined wardrobes by discovering epochs, styles, techniques, anecdotes, and languages of fashion from every era, in an endless game of quotations and cross-references.”
The connection here to international rights trading is the involvement of the Bologna Licensing Trade Fair/Kids program, which boosts rights-deal relations between book publishing and licensing each year, with its own centrally located spot at the sprawling BolognaFiere complex.
And in a nod to Shanghai and Bologna, today (November 8), we start with several children’s books—including one themed on Christmas—and we include some adult books as well, with gratitude, as ever, from agents and rights directors getting to us with their information. Our books today originally were published in France, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Indonesia, and Norway.
As in each roundup, we use some of the sales copy supplied to us by agents and rights directors, editing that copy to give you an idea about a book’s nature and tone, but limiting the promotional elements. If you’d like to submit a deal to Publishing Perspectives, see the instructions at the end of this article.
The Christmas Star
By Sara B. Elfgren and Johan Egerkrans
- Publisher: Rabén & Sjögren, Stockholm
- Rights contact: Jenny Khayon, the Grand Agency
- Book info: Read more here
Reported rights sales:
- Newest – Italy: LupoGuido
- Ukraine: In auction, publisher to be named
- Denmark: In auction, publisher to be named
Sara B. Elfgren and Johan Egerkrans
“In late November, it begins to snow over the forest ranger’s cottage.
“A new child has just been born, but the little one is tiny and weak. One dark night, a little star falls from the sky. The star spreads warmth and becomes friends with the children.
“But an evil wizard, Corvius Craxus, wants to capture star.
“Soon, the children are in the land East of the Sun, West of the Moon. Can they save their friend the star from the wizard’s clutches? And will they get home in time for Christmas?”
The Sleepless
By Jen Williams
- Publisher: Macmillan Children’s Books, First Ink, London
- Rights contact: Alice Natali, Macmillan Children’s Books
- Book info: Read more here
Reported rights sales:
- Newest – Italy: Mondadori/Chrysalide
- German: S Fischer
- Polish: Jaguar
In this instance of “romantasy,” a character called Elver is “the guardian of the wild and dangerous monster forest. Saved from the brink of death by a god, her skin will poison anyone she touches.
Jen Williams
“Artair is on a mission, one that takes him face-to-face with Elver at her most ruthless. But her defenses are useless when she discovers that he’s the only human impervious to her deadly gift. That’s because Artair isn’t human: he’s one of the Sleepless, cursed to share his body with an evil spirit. Lucian inhabits that body while Artair sleeps, and he is hell-bent on manipulating Elver for his dark purposes. But Elver is harboring secrets too, and she has her own reasons for feigning an alliance with these two souls.
“Caught in the crossfire of gods, monsters, and a dangerous magic they can barely understand, it is only a matter of time before the paths the three of them choose to take will set alight the very foundations of their world.”
The von Humbug Family: The Miracle Powder
By Karen Kilane & Hans Jørgen Sandnes
- Publisher: Cappelen Damm, Oslo
- Rights contact: Ingvild Haugland Blatt, Cappelen Damm Agency
- Book info: Read more here
Reported rights sales:
- Newest – Denmark: Gyldendal, in a multi-party auction
Karen Kilane and Hans Jørgen Sandnes
“All her life, Lucy has dreamed of a grandfather who will look after her and make her hot chocolate with whipped cream.
“But when Grandpa von Humbug finally appears, Lucy quickly realizes that he is not like other grandfathers.
“Grandpa von Humbug loves to make quick money—no matter the cost.
“When he and his new girlfriend get their hands on Lucy’s latest invention, a miracle powder, it’s a disaster waiting to happen.”
The Cappelen Damm Agency tells us that ‘The Miracle Powder’ drew quite a bit of rights interest at Frankfurt in October.
The Dog Meows, The Cat Barks
By Eka Kurniawan
- Publisher: Gramedia, Jakarta
- Rights contact: Anna Soler-Pont at Pontas Literary & Film Agency
- Book info: Read more here
Reported rights sales:
- Newest – German: Unionsverlag
- English, North America: under offer, publisher to be named
- English, India: under offer, publisher to be named
- English, Southeast Asia: under offer, publisher to be named
- French: Sabine Wespieser
“Sato enjoys an idyllic childhood of soccer and mischief in his Javanese town–until the day he’s circumcised and his father forces him into a life of Islamic piety.
Eka Kurniawan
“After a series of humiliations, including being forced into friendship with Jamal, a boy he despises, Sato starts to scheme.
“His first victory: finding catharsis in setting the town movie theater on fire.
“This novella tests the links between religious piety and violence and offers a meditation on devotion and sacrilege, force and freedom.”
Promised Lands
(Terres promises)
By Bénédicte Dupré La Tour
- Publisher: Le Panseur, Marseille
- Rights contact: Magalie Delobelle, So Far So Good agency
- Book info: Read more here
Reported rights sales:
- Newest – Croatia: Znanje
- French pocket rights: Pocket
Bénédicte Dupré La Tour
“Terres Promises is a ‘choral novel’ that finds an echo in the migrations and struggles of our century.
“It features ‘forgotten voices of the conquest of the Wild West’ such as Eleanor, the prostitute who awaits the hour of justice; Kinta, the native who emancipates herself from her clan; and Morgan, the mad gold miner.”
This books “is a feminist and social vision of the Gold Rush, in which the conquest is a defeat, and the rush is a blow taken in the head and in the heart.”
L’être et la mer: Pour un existentialisme écologique
(Being and the Sea: Toward an Ecological Existentialism)
By Corine Pelluchon
- Publisher: Presses Universitaires de France (Note that November 11 to 15 is the 2024 edition of University Press Week)
- Rights contact: Sandrine Paccher, Presses Universitaires de France
- Book info: Read more here
Reported rights sales:
- Newest – Germany: CH Beck
- Spain: Herder
“Ecological existentialism cannot be reduced to co-existentialism with the sea.
Corine Pelluchon
“It supposes that we break away from earthly imagination and think of the human starting from the sea. The phenomenology of marine life reveals the fluidity of the self and conceives our immersion in one common world, which recalls memory and the immemorial, to the sea-mother conceived in its precedence over lands.
“While emphasizing the relevance of existentialism, which implies accepting the fact of our condition and illuminating the link between contingency and freedom, indeterminacy of meaning and responsibility, Pelluchon shows that ecology requires enriching it. But ecological existentialism is not reduced to co-existentialism attesting to our belonging to a community of living beings.
“Based on a liquid ontology, this existentialism breaks with the territorial obsession that explains the contradictions of international maritime law, torn between the imperative of preserving an ecosystem essential to our survival and the economic and military rivalries leading to its overexploitation.
“Opposed to any thought of rooting, this phenomenology of marine life highlights the fluidity of the self and conceives our immersion in the common world, which refers to memory and the immemorial, to the mother sea conceived in its precedence over the land.”
Submitting Rights Deals to Publishing Perspectives
Do you have rights deals to report? Agents and publishing-house rights directors can use our rights deal submission form to send us the information we need. If you have questions, please send them to Porter@PublishingPerspectives.com
We look forward to hearing from you.
More of Publishing Perspectives‘ rights roundups are here, and more from us on international rights trading is here.
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