Starting this Saturday, November 29, anyone entering the Guadalajara International Book Fair will cross a public square in Barcelona. A porticoed pavilion with benches and olive trees in the center, reminiscent of Plaza Real next to Las Ramblas or Plaza Vicenç Martorell, will host Barcelona’s programming as a guest of honor at FIL. The work of architect Santiago de León and the Fabric studio, the design pays homage to Barcelona’s public space and becomes a large cultural center: a library with more than 10,000 titles on one side and an auditorium for a hundred people on the other. The Catalan capital is presented under the motto
The mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, commissioner Anna Guitart and Marisol Schulz, director of the FIL, will inaugurate the pavilion this Saturday, in a day that will conclude with the boarding of their instruments at Barcelona Airport first thing on Thursday.
“The flowers have already arrived,” said Collboni from the Cabañas Museum where Barcelona’s cultural program was kicked off with the inauguration of two exhibitions. From there, he claimed the “diverse Barcelona” that the program represents and also recalled the importance of the Republican exile in Mexico, “home and refuge of Catalan literature: we are what we are, as a democracy and as a culture, thanks to it.” In a speech where the names of Montserrat Roig and Jacint Verdaguer, some of the protagonists of the exhibitions, stood out, the mayor also stated that literature in Catalan has expanded over the last twenty years thanks to translations and a rich publishing market. On Sunday, the Literary Salon will open.
Barcelona arrives in Mexico after a 2024 event with Spain as a guest that broke records for attendees and writers in attendance. It is a cultural diplomacy operation of enormous ambition, which will also be joined by the President of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, and which will include the visit of Vice President Yolanda Díaz. The program, designed by Guitart, aims to show the city through its culture. and gastronomy, and collaboration in programs such as FIL Ciencia or FIL Pensamiento.
As curator Guitart has been insisting for months, the desire is to explain today’s Barcelona, also with its tensions and problems, but without forgetting tributes to key figures of the Catalan literary tradition, such as Rodoreda, Verdaguer or Brossa, or the legacy of exile. The program will bring into conversation authors in Spanish and Catalan, writers with recognized careers, best-sellers and debutants, with names such as Mercè Ibarz, Xavier Bosch, Carme Riera, Miquel de Palol, Josep Pedrals, Javier Cercas, Adrià Targa, Mireia Calafell, Irene Pujadas or Victoria Szpunberg. Also Joan Manuel Serrat, who, after half a century of his exile in Mexico, will receive an Honoris Causa doctorate from the University of Guadalajara during the fair.
This extensive program will take place inside the large FIL pavilion, a shell like an industrial warehouse of 34,000 square meters, about three football fields, which last year broke a record for attendees, exceeding 900,000. Unlike the Frankfurt Fair, which only brings together professionals from the sector, the Mexican event is the most important in Latin America and its audience is readers. The fair has regained its vigor after the Covid hit, which forced it to hold a virtual edition, and “We have gone through a difficult time, but we have gotten back up. And this year we have the great avant-garde literary and publishing capital,” says Schulz.
Transatlantic book capital
The first contacts that led Barcelona to be the guest of honor of the FIL were within the framework of the 2022 REACT conferences, when the City Council invited Schulz, but Collboni states that they have been thinking about promoting this event for ten years, and mentions Xavier Marcé, Councilor for Culture, as the inspiration for the decision. However, the link between Barcelona and Guadalajara can be traced much earlier. Mexico was home to exiles after the civil war, something that President Salvador Illa will remember in Mexico City on Sunday and that was decisive for the publication and survival of the work of key names in Catalan literature, such as Josep Carner, Anna Murià, Tísner or Pere Calders.
Then came the boom. He baptized Barcelona as “the transatlantic literary bridge” when, in the early 1960s, he decided to publish on his label. The city and the dogsthe first novel by Mario Vargas Llosa. Barral was “trying to publish modern literature, to open up that somewhat rarefied world of Spanish literature of those days,” as the future Nobel Prize winner would recall many years later.
Another key name of the one who at that time worked at Seix Barral managing translations and rights abroad. Her proverbial sense of smell made her take a decisive step: to become an agent of this group of young talents to, above all, provide them with the money necessary to dedicate time to their art and not to jobs to survive. This is what he did with Vargas Llosa. In 1970, Balcells stood at the door of the Peruvian’s London home, where he taught at a university, to convince him that he should dedicate himself exclusively to literature and that the best way to do so was to move to Barcelona with his family.
Of that trident, which is already part of the history of literature in the Spanish language, at least two of its figures will be present at the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL). The relatives of Balcells, who died in 2015, will attend a tribute to the boom super agent. While Vargas Llosa will receive another tribute after his death this spring, in which Javier Cercas, Leonardo Padura and the editor Pilar Reyes will participate.
The great editorial event in Spanish
The great fair of America, the most important publishing event in Spanish in the world, can be considered, after 39 editions, heir and part of that transatlantic bridge of literature. It would be the American extreme, which this year also explicitly connects with the other extreme, by bringing Barcelona as a guest to the contest. An example of this is translation: this year’s invitation has served to translate and publish the work of many writers in Catalan. Thanks to the help of the Institut Ramon Llull, these are books that will find new readers at the FIL.
This common thread is represented better than anyone by Schulz, who was previously director of Alfaguara and had to “be the shadow”, as she says, of authors such as Carlos Fuentes or Vargas Llosa himself. Mexico is the traditional gateway for the Latin American market and FIL – the second largest fair in the world behind Frankfurt – is the springboard to dive into the publishing business. This year, more than 18,000 book professionals, 2,800 publishing labels from 60 countries and the participation of more than 800 authors are expected to attend.
Beyond books
The inauguration of the program took place yesterday with the five exhibitions in two of the main art centers in Guadalajara, the Museo Cabañas and the MUSA, and was attended by local and Barcelona authorities. The visual arts program includes two newly created exhibitions, which will later travel to Barcelona. One of them is The women will come. 150 years of struggle in the streets of Barcelona, curated by Mita Casacuberta, Ingrid Guardiola and Anna Maria Iglesia. The exhibition is based on a question: What does a dignified life mean? It is answered by 100 writers, not always heard, who have explored the relationship with public space in their work, both from the bourgeois neighborhoods that have written the official history, and from the margins and social movements. Three installations by Cabosanroque on the figures of Rodoreda, Brossa and Verdaguer, which could already be seen in Barcelona, can be visited in the same museum.
At the MUSA, the graphic designer Enric Jardí curated the exhibition The books of Barcelonawhich includes a selection of more than three hundred books to position Barcelona as the capital of editorial design. In complicity with the DHub, Jardí has rescued books that date back to the 17th century, from covers illustrated by Lluís Domènech i Montaner or a collection from the legendary Catalonia bookstore to designs that have marked an identity such as La cua de palla by Edicions 62 or Panorama de narratives by Anagrama.
But not everything will be Barcelona. Here will be Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Nigerian writer based in the United States and author of the best-selling book Americanah. The Cuban Leonardo Padura, the Mexican Guillermo Arriaga. Or Xue Mo, one of the most unique and recognized voices in contemporary Chinese literature. “We seek a balance between leading and established authors with other offerings so that readers find new voices that they otherwise would not have the possibility of knowing,” adds Schulz. Nor will there be only literature. In the science section, the Indian Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, will arrive. Or the Guatemalan Rigoberta Menchú, Nobel Peace Prize winner.
