Book Fairs Today: Challenges, Prospects and What the Future Holds

Moderated by Ziv Lewis - Foreign Rights & Acquisitions Manager, Kinneret Zmora Publishing House, Israel

Ziv Lewis is head of scouting, acquisitions, and foreign rights at Kinneret Zmora – Israel’s largest trade publishing house. Previously he was an agent in Tel Aviv for twenty years.

Juergen Boos - President & CEO, Frankfurter Buchmesse, Germany

Juergen Boos trained as a publisher at Herder Verlag (Freiburg) in the early 1980s and has degrees in both Marketing and Organizational Theory. He has held management positions at Droemer Knaur Verlag (Munich), Carl Hanser Verlag (Munich), as well as Springer Science and Business Media (today Springer Science) and John Wiley & Sons (Weinheim). He became President and CEO of the Frankfurter Buchmesse GmbH (Frankfurt Book Fair) in 2005 and is President of LITPROM (Society for the Promotion of African, Asian and Latin American Literature) and Managing Director of LitCam (Frankfurter Buchmesse Literacy Campaign).

Photo © Frankfurter BuchmesseJonas Ratermann

Nopi Chatzigeorgiou - Book Fairs Coordinatorat Hellenic Foundation for Culture (HFC), Thessaloniki Book fair, Greece

After studying philology, philosophy and theater (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki), Nopi Chatzigeorgiou has been working in the book sector (cultural management and communications) since 1997 at Kastaniotis Editions and then at the National Book Centre of Greece. At the HFC she now is head of the international Book Fairs department (conception, curation and organization of international events for the book trade & creative industries worldwide).

Elena Pasoli - Director, Bologna Children's Book Fair, Italy

Elena Pasoli is the Director of the Bologna Children’s Book Fair (BCBF), a member of the Executive Committee of the Italian Centre for Book and Reading and of the Executive Committee of Ibby –  International Board on Books for Young People. She coordinates many international activities, such as the co-organization of the China Shanghai International Children’s Book Fair (CCBF), and the tours of children’s illustrations exhibitions in more than 30 countries. She brought the Bologna book fair to win in 2018 the international Eric Carle Honor prize in the Bridge Category. She has a degree in Classic Literature.

Frida Edman - Direcor, Bokmässan Göteborg Book Fair, Sweeden

Frida Edman is the director of the Gothenburg Book Fair. The book fair in Sweden is the Nordic countries biggest cultural event. Frida and her team have made the fair not just to an event promoting reading, nor it is not only about selling and buying rights. It is an epicenter of open discussions and debates – We are an engine for the industry’s most important issues and a platform of free speech where the most current topics is discussed since literature is a reflection of what is going on in the society, she says.

Photo by Karina Ljungdahl