The 63rd Bologna Children’s Book Fair runs Monday, April 13, through Thursday, April 16, at the Bologna Exhibition Centre, bringing together roughly 1,500 exhibitors from 90 countries for four days of rights trading, programming, and awards. It’s the largest and most international gathering dedicated to children’s publishing in the world, with more than 33,000 visitors expected. The fair includes BolognaBookPlus, the general trade publishing section organized with the Italian Publishers Association (AIE), as well as the Bologna Licensing Trade Fair for Kids. Norway is this year’s guest-of-honor country.
Once again BCBF will take place against a sobering backdrop of geopolitical tension and war, including in Ukraine and the Middle East. Elena Pasoli, the fair’s director, says she has turned down repeated calls to create a special BolognaRagazzi Award category for books about war and peace. “Our daily work must and does already demonstrate what values we believe in,” she says, adding that promoting the love of books and the joy of reading are the fair’s core priorities. In keeping with that principle, the fair’s underlying theme this year is how to tackle the global decline in reading among young people.
In its latest long-term trend study, the National Assessment of Educational Progress reported a steady drop in tweens’ pleasure reading in the United States. And a recent Common Sense Media survey indicating that tweens are spending upwards of five hours per day on digital devices and screens highlights the ongoing battle for kids’ time and attention.
To address this issue, on Monday, at the Illustrators Café, BCBF and AIE will convene Building the Future Generation of Readers: Best Practices and Policies for Reading Promotion, a conference that brings together the Federation of European Publishers, France’s Syndicat National de l’Édition, the International Publishers Association, and the International Board on Books for Young People. The event will showcase successful reading promotion initiatives from around the world—including Italy’s #ioleggoperché, France’s quart d’heure de lecture, and the U.K.’s National Year of Reading—before moving into a policy discussion moderated by Luis Gonzalez, director of Madrid’s Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez.
“Supporting access to books, fostering a culture of reading, and reaffirming the transformative power of stories are not only part of our mission,” Pasoli says, “they are at the very heart of who we are.”
Despite the fair’s celebration of print publishing, it draws no distinction between print and digital formats when it comes to addressing the reading crisis. On Wednesday and Thursday, researchers, authors, publishers, teachers, and representatives from the European Commission will offer a series of panels about storytelling and reading practices in the age of AI, centered on the release of the “Report of the Observatory on Digital Narratives,” a joint initiative of Literacy Italia and BCBF, developed in collaboration with Norway’s literary nonprofit NORLA. The approach is pragmatic and acknowledges that AI has entered children’s storytelling; the question is how best to address it. A separate session at the Illustrators Survival Corner featuring author-illustrator Anna Castagnoli will take a similar approach, looking at AI as a tool rather than a threat.
AI runs through the fair’s programming more broadly, with an AI Summit hosted by BBPlus. Pasoli draws a comparison to the arrival of digital illustration tools at the turn of the millennium. “There was a big discussion about it, and many people said this would be the killer of illustration,” she says. “Nowadays, it is a perfect tool because it is driven by human creativity.” On AI’s broader disruption, she doesn’t mince words: “You take it in a negative way and get killed by it, or you take it in a positive way and ask how it can be helpful to you.”
The awards
Prizes are a tentpole feature of the fair, which opens on Monday night with the presentation of the annual Bologna Prize for the Best Children’s Publishers of the Year, voted on by the publishing community and awarded to exceptional children’s publishing houses around the world. The announcements take place at Palazzo Re Enzo in the city center.
On March 3 in Milan, the fair announced the winners of the 2026 BolognaRagazzi Awards, which honor the best children’s books of the past year and will also be presented during Monday’s ceremony. For the 2026 prizes, publishers from 73 countries and regions submitted a record 4,120 titles. Publishers from Ecuador, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Rwanda submitted for the first time.
In the fiction category, the winner is Ingrávida (Weightless) by Fran Pintadera, illustrated by Raquel Catalina, published by Bookolia in Spain. The nonfiction winner is Ana (Who Am I?) by Qais Hinti, illustrated by Esraa Hedery, from Al Salwa Publishers in Jordan. The winner for the special fables and fairy tales category is The Story of a Brother and a Sister by Lee Uk Bae, from Sakyejul
Publishing in South Korea. The Opera Prima for best debut went to Dove andiamo quando moriamo? (Where Do We Go When We Die?) by Samy Ramos, from Italian publisher Corraini Edizioni.
The winner in the toddler category is Río Viento (Wind River) from Ediciones El Naranjo in Mexico, written by Adolfo Córdova and illustrated by Mariana Alcántara, the same illustrator who won the fair’s portfolio award last year—a progression Pasoli cites as proof of BCBF’s ability to spot talent. “I am very proud of the scouting work that we do,” she says.
In comics, the early reader winner is Casey’s Cases: The Mysterious New Girl by Kay Healy, from Neal Porter Books in the U.S.; the middle grade winner is Le Journal de Samuel (Samuel’s Journal) by Emilie Tronche, from Casterman in France; and the young adult winner is Sentimental Kiss by Camille Van Hoof, from L’employé du moi in Belgium. The New Horizons special prize went to Village by Julie Safirstein, from Éditions du livre in France.
featured speakers and exhibitions
Jacqueline Woodson—who won the 2025 Premio Strega Ragazze e Ragazzi, Italy’s most prestigious award for children’s literature—will make her first appearance at BCBF. She’ll be interviewed on Tuesday by Maria Russo, former children’s books editor at the New York Times Book Review and editor-at-large at Union Square Kids, and will also speak at the Salaborsa public library in the city center.
Italian medievalist Alessandro Barbero, who has millions of social media followers, will speak on Thursday about the evolution of children’s literature, in conversation with Ivan Canu. His appearance follows a full day dedicated to The Adventures of Pinocchio on Wednesday, marking the 200th anniversary of the birth of Carlo Collodi, the author of the novel. The exhibition Italian Excellence: Pinocchio’s New Clothes will feature 50 illustrations—25 by established artists and 25 by emerging artists selected from 600 international candidates—at the International Bookshop.
The Illustrators Exhibition marks its 60th anniversary, having received more than 20,000 illustrations from 96 countries and regions. Pasoli notes that there are two young artists who stand out: Korean illustrator Bumi Cha, 21, who designed the fair’s 2026 visual identity, and Ukrainian artist Maria Haiduk, 19, the youngest-ever winner of the Bologna Children’s Book Fair–Fundación SM International Illustration Award, whose illustrated book El señor Kotsky (Mr. Kotsky), based on a Ukrainian fairy tale, is being given a solo exhibition.
The Hans Christian Andersen Award will be announced Monday, and the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award on Tuesday. Several finalists for both are attending the fair, including Beatrice Alemagna, Timothée de Fombelle, Cai Gao, and Michael Rosen. The WIPO Excellence Award for Accessible Publishing, organized by the Accessible Books Consortium, will be presented at Bologna for the first time, on Monday.
Norway’s guest-of-honor presentation is built around the motto “What if?”—a phrase intended to invoke curiosity, as in, “What if up were down? What if outside were inside? What if I were you?” Forty-nine Norwegian illustrators will be featured in the main exhibition, and there will be a variety of presentations from Grafill, Norway’s organization for visual communication.
Rights, licensing, and reach
The fair’s rights center continues to grow and anticipates some 200 agents from both children’s and adult publishing will participate this year. BCBF’s TV/Film Rights Centre and Games Business Centre, run in collaboration with the Frankfurt Book Fair, are joined this year by a new Toy Zone, reflecting what Pasoli calls “the growing connections between toys and children’s books.”
NielsenIQ BookData is also launching its new report covering Italian publishing data at the fair, along with the new Italian Bestseller Awards in partnership with BBPlus.
The fair’s “world tour,” which sees Pasoli and others participate in a variety of global exhibitions and fairs, will expand this year to include, after BCBF, a Festival of Italian Illustration in New York running June 8–13; the Beijing Book Fair, June 17–21; and MipCom in Cannes in October, which will include a special edition of the Illustrators Survival Corner.
For Pasoli, the tour is an expression of her core belief that the work of finding the right book for each child is worth the trip, whether to Bologna or anywhere else in the world. “It is our generous way of sharing Bologna beyond Bologna,” she says.
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