Noticia

Spain will be the Guest of Honor at the Bogotá International Book Fair (FILBo), which will take place from April 25 to May 11 this year, emphasizing peace as a link with literature and culture.

The Bogotá International Book Fair will explore the ways in which literature, science, and art address the body as a symbol of identity, memory, and resistance. Within the business line, there are the International Business Hall, the Fellowship Program, and the Librarians' Mission, scenarios that further consolidate the Fair as a key platform for the book industry in the first half of the year.

Writers such as the Colombian Laura Restrepo; the Puerto Rican Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro; the Argentinians Andrés Neuman and Luis Pecetti; the Korean Kim Un-su; the German Fritz Breithaupt; the German-Argentinian María Cecilia Barbetta; the Swiss Dorothée Elmiger; the Venezuelan Arianna de Sousa-García; the Dominican Frank Báez; the Uruguayan Mabel Moraña; the American Elise Kova; the Italian Susanna Mattiangeli; and the Cuban Maikel Rodríguez will be some of the personalities who will lead conversations about literature, history, and society.

Bogotá, February 13, 2025. The Colombian capital is preparing for the thirty-seventh edition of the Bogotá International Book Fair (FILBo), which will take place from April 25 to May 11, 2025. This event, organized by Corferias and the Colombian Book Chamber (CCL), transcends borders to become a space for reflection, conversation, memory, meeting, and editorial business. Additionally, this year it will have a conceptual axis as universal as it is intimate: The Words of the Body.

Thus, FILBo invites us to think of the body not only as biological matter but as a symbolic space where identity, memory, and resistance converge. Therefore, the Fair's programming will explore corporeality from literature, science, art, philosophy, and politics. Visitors will be able to approach this theme from various perspectives such as female experience, sexual diversity, disability, violence, equity, thought, time, migration, pleasure, among others.

Adriana Ángel Forero, director of the Fair on behalf of the CCL, says: "The body is the first territory we inhabit, but we rarely stop to explore it in its complexity. At FILBo 2025, we want literature to help us understand it beyond the biological: as a space of memory, identity, and resistance. From science to poetry, the body is the meeting point of our emotions, experiences, and social transformations. In times when questions about our materiality are more urgent than ever, FILBo will be the stage to reflect on what it means to exist, feel, and share from the body and the word."

Catalina Chávez, director of FILBo on behalf of Corferias, states: "We are proud of this year's FILBo theme and excited about Spain's arrival as the guest of honor, as it promises a journey through centuries of literature, thought, and culture, in an enriching dialogue with Colombia. This will be a unique opportunity for writers and readers to explore together the connections that unite us at Corferias, a unique place that is an icon of the movement and growth of the publishing industry every year."

First Announced Authors

FILBo 2025 will feature national and international literary figures, such as the renowned writer Laura Restrepo (Colombia), who has masterfully narrated the darkest and brightest corners of the human experience; Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro (Puerto Rico), a prominent novelist and essayist for her works on migration and feminism in the Caribbean.

Also present will be the Argentine Andrés Neuman, poet, narrator, and translator, winner of the Alfaguara Prize; from South Korea will come Kim Un-su, author of The Plotters, a literary thriller of Korean noir, translated into multiple languages and adapted into a film.

Arianna de Sousa-García (Venezuela), author of Atrás queda la tierra, her first narrative work, is a moving non-fiction novel about the Venezuelan diaspora, the pain caused by dispossession and violence.

Fritz Breithaupt will come from Germany with his essay The Narrative Brain, exploring the impact of stories on society; María Cecilia Barbetta (German-Argentinian), awarded several prizes in Germany, including the Alfred Döblin Scholarship, the Aspekte-Literaturpreis, the Chamisso/Hellerau Prize; also from the Old Continent will participate the Swiss writer and translator Dorothée Elmiger, Swiss Literature Prize.

Connecting visitors with the Caribbean, the Fair will feature Frank Báez (Dominican Republic), poet and narrator, creator of the spoken word collective "El Hombrecito." Traveling to the south of the continent, the Uruguayan Mabel Moraña will talk about corporeality and desire, themes she has worked on in books such as Pensar el cuerpo. She is currently the director of the Latin American Studies Program at Washington University in Saint Louis, where she teaches courses on viceregal studies to the present, focusing on the baroque, nationalism, and modernity.

In the Children's and Young Adult Literature section, the Bogotá International Book Fair will feature authors such as Elise Kova (USA), known for her narrative that escapes the usual sensuality, focusing on the emotional growth of her characters and who wrote the bestseller A Duel with the Vampire Lord; Susanna Mattiangeli (Italy), Andersen Prize 2018 for Best Writer of the Year, the most prestigious literary award in Italy, creator of Crescendo, the story of Milo, a deaf boy, in a town without music and how he discovers it when it returns to his town; Maikel Rodríguez (Cuba), a prominent writer of children's and young adult literature, multi-awarded for his horror works, Romance of the Bad Girl Award for his literary career; and Luis Pescetti (Argentina), Latin Grammy for Best Children's Music Album, ALIJA Award (IBBY Argentina) and Caniem Award for his book Emotional First Aid Kit for Humans and Superheroes: The Right to Know We Are Not What We Feel.

Spain, a Literary Bridge

This year, Spain will be the guest of honor and will arrive with the proposal 'A Culture for Peace, with Others and with the Planet,' the theme of the program organized by the Ministry of Culture of the Government of Spain and Acción Cultural Española (AC/E). Thus, the Iberian nation responds to the Fair's invitation with another invitation: to create a meeting space centered on books, a place of knowledge and imagination, an agora for dialogue about the issues that concern citizens today.

Antonio Monegal, National Essay Prize 2023, commissioner designated by Spain, through its Ministry of Culture and AC/E, for participation in FILBo 2025, comments: "It is not just a conversation between Colombia and Spain but between all the countries that share common languages, literary traditions, cultural spaces, and history. Like any conversation, each one contributes their experiences, their imaginations, their memory, from different perspectives of each country. In this dialogue, books are our allies and friends, but they are also indispensable instruments of change. They help us face the world's problems, understand what is happening, approach other people's experiences, learn empathy, and imagine solutions."

Monegal adds: "Books are also repositories of memory: they invite us to look back to look forward. Peace is not just the absence of war, a truce between violences. Peace is also a desire for understanding, a willingness to negotiate differences and disagreements, an aspiration to coexistence, and a commitment to care for the natural environment we share."

Some of the writers of great impact in narrative, poetry, and essay that Spain will bring, reflecting the diversity that characterizes its current literature, are: Marta Sanz (Madrid), Herralde Novel Prize and finalist for the Nadal Prize, whose work delves into memory and identity with incisive prose. Clara Usón (Barcelona), author of The Daughter of the East, National Critics Prize; her most recent novel, The Beasts, explores a generation marked by violence and political conflict. Francesc Serés (Zaidín, Huesca), Aragonese writer in Catalan, winner of the National Literature Prize of Catalonia; Ismael Ramos (Mazaricos, La Coruña), one of the emerging voices of Spanish poetry for the power of his reflections on identity and language; and Leire Bilbao (Ondárroa, Vizcaya), poet in Basque, whose work rescues Basque orality with a contemporary perspective.

FILBo, a Platform to Connect Business and Industry Experts

The Fair reaffirms its role as the epicenter of the publishing business in Latin America during the first half of the year, with Professional Days that include key spaces to strengthen the book industry. In business terms, there is the International Business Hall, the Fellowship Program, and the Librarians' Mission, which, along with 12 specialized days aimed at all actors in the book chain, make FILBo the central stage of the industry in the first half of the year.

One of these spaces is the International Business Hall, a strategic meeting where publishers, literary agents, and distributors from around the world will meet to finalize book purchase and sale agreements, as well as editing and translation rights, promoting the circulation of content globally. This initiative energizes the publishing market, facilitating strategic connections and new business opportunities for industry professionals.

Additionally, the Fair will offer two scenarios designed to expand access to Colombian literature, such as the Fellowship Program, which invites seven international literary agents interested in enriching their catalogs with national editorial production.

These include Rory Williamson (United Kingdom), editor at Pushkin Press, where he publishes fiction and non-fiction; Baha Sonmez (Turkey), general manager of Redhouse and board member of the Turkish Publishers