International Book Festival Budapest

This year’s XVIIth International Book Festival Budapest is opened on 22 April. This year Israel’s culture, contemporary literature and book publishing is the special guest in Budapest, with a rich programme and the world-famous writer Amos Oz, whose new work, Rhyming Life and Death, will be published in Hungarian just in time for the Book Festival by Európa Publishing. Following a number of renowned colleagues, this year Amos Oz will be presented the Budapest Grand Prize by the Lord Mayor of Budapest after György Konrád’s speech in his honour.

Israel will present many of its faces at the Book Festival, with about a dozen book presentations, literary programmes and on-stage conversations giving an impression of the Israel that preserves its traditions, its history and its culture as well as the economy and politics of the six decades of the modern state. The Guest of Honour presentation also includes concerts and two photo exhibitions. At the Israeli national stand, not only a selection of the production of contemporary Israeli book publishing will be presented, but also books by Israeli writers and from the field of Jewish studies that were published in Hungarian by Hungarian publishers in recent years or especially for the Book Festival.

This year’s Book Festival will welcome writers and exhibitors from 24 countries, and apart from Israel as the Guest of Honour Country, this will be the first time for an Arabian country, Saudi Arabia, to present itself in Budapest—other first-time exhibitors being publishers from Brazil, Vietnam and Austria. As returning exhibitors we will welcome our Polish, Spanish, Russian, Greek, Romanian, Japanese and Chinese partners. Several German publishers and booksellers will have stands at the Budapest Festival, but due to the economic crises that also affects the world’s publishing industry, this is the first time in the history of the Book Festival without a German national stand, as the Management of the Frankfurt Book Fair did not receive the required subsidies form the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs this year.

On the other hand, the European First Novel Festival, the cultural event with the most extensive cooperation in the EU until today, launched following a magnificent suggestion by the French Institute in Budapest ten years ago, is celebrating its anniversary this year. Again, the most successful first novel authors from 17 countries will come to Budapest, among them Viktor Horváth, author of one of the best Hungarian historical novels of the past decades. Including this year’s guests, more than 140 young writers got to know each other and presented themselves to the literature-loving public in the past 10 years, and many of them have become not only significant figures of their respective country’s literature, but can also take pride in a number of foreign translations, such as—to give only one example—György Dragomán, whose works are available in the languages of more than 100 countries.

2010.04.22. - 2010.04.25.