Barcelona, Guest of Honor at the Guadalajara International Book Fair 2025

The city of Barcelona will be the Guest of Honor at the Guadalajara International Boof Fair (FIL), in Mexico in 2025. This has been announced by the Mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, and the Director General of the FIL, Marisol Schulz.

The FIL is the most important cultural event in Ibero-America. Through its three areas of action, publishing, academic and cultural, it has established itself as a nerve centre for the discussion of contemporary culture. Founded by the University of Guadalajara in 1987, each edition is attended by some 750 authors from around fifty countries, and three thousand activities are programmed over nine days.

Since 1993, the FIL has had the presence of a region, city or country Guest of Honour. This year 2023 it is the European Union, and next year it will be Spain. The Guest of Honour plays a leading role in all areas of the event and Barcelona is committed, in the 2025 edition, to carry out, among others, the following actions: construction and setting of the Pavilion; coordinating and financing a delegation of authors that includes the maximum number of literary categories and genres; guaranteeing a large representation of publishers, translators and agents; and promoting the sector of illustration, design and new formats. The City Council has announced that a curator will be established to define the content of the city’s presence at the FIL, as well as a city promotion group as a result of public-private collaboration.

The Guadalajara FIL will help to strengthen Barcelona’s cultural and economic position in Latin America and among a wide range of emerging Hispanic sectors in the USA. Barcelona has been recognised as a literary city by UNESCO since 2015. In the 1960s and 1970s, the city played a leading role in a large part of the “boom” of modern Latin American literature, putting authors as important as García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Cortázar and José Donoso on the world map, and it is home to a large number of publishing houses that are very active in the book market and particularly careful when it comes to evaluating new authors.

For more information about FIL, click this link.

In the image, a moment of the FIL 2022. © FIL Guadalajara.