Spain returns to the FIL Guadalajara being another country, with another audience

The 38th edition of the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL) is a new way of understanding the guest, Spain, who returns 24 years later, being another country, with a different generation of readers, writers and cultural consumptionand meets another Mexican audience. This was explained by Marisol Schulz Manaut, head of the editorial meeting.

Many of the participants in the FIL that will take place from November 30 to December 8 were not born as writers in 2000, Schulz told The Day. Now we have a new generation and I am not talking about the entire public that comes to the FIL, which has an average age of 24 to 25 years. For Spain, Mexico is fundamental, culturally speaking, along with all of Latin America..

He related that the editions of the FIL with the European Union, Spain and Barcelona as guests were a coincidence that “happened almost organically. In the end, it is a very important sequence because of the following: in the world of the publishing industry, Spain is the main commercial partner for all publishers.

“Any mid-level Spanish editor onwards will always go to FIL. It is a literary power too. There is a lot of interest in Spanish writers throughout Latin America. As Sergio Ramírez, who created the motto, said, ‘it’s a round trip.’”

For Schulz, although Spain is a multilingual country, we can say that the Spanish we speak is the one with which we can make ourselves understood in 22 Spanish-speaking countries and that already unites us, gives us a different starting point, beyond certain idiosyncrasies and cultural aspects that we share.

The success of the FIL Guadalajara, more than in quantitative terms, is represented by the quality of the content, the diversity and the satisfaction of the people, for example, the 200 thousand children who visit it, who They are happy and wait all year long to return.said Marisol Schulz.

He added that minors want to return to spaces “where they can have fun, learn, reading and other cultural manifestations are promoted; Young people not only listen to literature, but also topics that hit them hard, such as suicide and death. It’s about bringing people content that will make them think, that will move them a little. That’s part of success.

For her, It is a huge commitment to organize the FIL, and our happiness is precisely to see people’s satisfaction. The way we can measure that our work is well done is by seeing happy faces, happy children, who fill the presentation rooms, the hallways, seeing the Thursdays and Fridays of young people, without there being a way to pass between all these kids..

The editor recalled that the fair It is renewed every year, it is different each time, with a different guest, a diverse program, because it has varied audiences, even if the same people go, they are already of different ages. What we are betting on is the renewal.

Schulz Manaut commented that it has changed the cultural consumption we have and the ways of reading. Before, a writer who was successful 24 years ago in Spain, if a large publisher did not bet on him and there was no distribution of his book in Latin America, he was non-existent for us. Today, through social networks and many platforms, one wants to find out what is produced in Ecuador, let alone in Spain, and you find out immediately. That was unthinkable 24 years ago. It has revolutionized.

He recognized that different forms of reading coexist, “there are people who read in digital format but then return to the printed medium. The digital world has disrupted, above all, certain types of printed matter more than books. I see that very few people nowadays consult an encyclopedia, a dictionary or a manual. That is already seen digitally. However, the printed book continues to have a forceful presence.

There is a coexistence that seems to me to continue. The pandemic in some countries allowed people to return to electronics, but not so much in Mexico. It is a population in which not everyone has access to a tablet or a credit card to buy books electronically. Our circumstance is different and the printed book is still valid.

The meeting, the cultural promoter continued, is closely linked to the publishing industry. Alliances are essential and we work hand in hand with the editors and they present to us what their launches are going to be, their news; They bet on some authors and it is essential, because otherwise the fair’s budget would not be enough to have more than 800 writers. It becomes the great literary festival in Spanish thanks to the support of many labels.

Schulz emphasized the interest of continue supporting Spanish, our majority language, without prejudice to the other languages ​​spoken in both Mexico and America. In Catalonia, Spain, people speak Catalan all the time. The same thing happens with Galician, Asturian and Valencian. That coexistence and linguistic diversity is what Spain wants to reflect. In the case of FIL Guadalajara, we not only focus on the languages ​​spoken in that nation: we have authors from 47 languages ​​present..

Some of the more than 850 writers from 43 countries in the FIL Guadalajara program are Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah; the narrators László Krasznahorkai, Mia Couto, Sergio Ramírez, María Dueñas, Irene Vallejo, Gioconda Belli and Javier Cercas; the poets Luis García Montero and Nouri Al-Jarrah; the literary critic Ioana Pârvulescu, and the novelist Luis Mateo Díez. There will also be more than 620 book presentations.

More than 800 thousand attendees are expected to attend the more than 3 thousand literary, academic, artistic, professional, youth and children’s activities organized this year.