This year’s Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL), which runs in the western Mexican city from Saturday, November 29, to Sunday, December 7, promises some 3,000 events and activities, the presence of 18,000 publishing professionals, and the participation of 800 authors of 34 nationalities.

Among the 2,800 publishing houses from 60 countries represented at FIL, publishers from Bangladesh, Slovenia, and Sweden will make their debut at the fair, while the U.K. and Switzerland will return to the fair after being absent in recent years.

With more than 900,000 visitors expected over the nine-day event, this year will see the trade show once again outgrow its primary venue, Expo Guadalajara, and host events in nearby hotels, on the University of Guadalajara campus, and in some of the city’s cultural centers, such as the Conjunto Santander de Artes Escénicas, Hospicio Cabañas, el Museo de las Artes, and Museo de Arte de Zapopan. Off-site activities range from debate forums to art exhibitions and theatrical performances.

Spotlight on Barcelona

The Catalonian capital of Barcelona is this year’s guest of honor, bringing a delegation of 69 Spanish- and Catalan-language authors to Mexico. The city’s motto for its participation in this year’s FIL is “the flowers will come,” an allusion to a line from the short story “Felicitat” by Catalan author Mercè Rodoreda (1908–1983), considered one of Catalonia’s most celebrated writers.

FIL director Marisol Schulz Manaut says Barcelona’s presence is “the manifestation of a deep, historical, and close relationship between two worlds that share a cultural imagination and vocation.” She points to the essential work of the late Barcelona-based literary agent Carmen Balcells (1930–2015), who championed Latin American writers and is credited with contributing to the so-called boom in Latin American literature in the 1960s. Balcells, Schulz notes, “knew how to create a powerful connection between the literatures of both sides of the Atlantic.” A tribute to Balcells will be held on December 1, featuring Schulz, Spanish novelists Carme Riera and Eduardo Mendoza, Grupo Planeta’s CEO for Latin America José Calafell, and Barcelona-born journalist Xavi Ayén.

Schulz says this year’s FIL “will be very special for various reasons,” chief among them “the depth of the cultural dialogue we are building with Barcelona. We are not only welcoming the editorial capital of the Spanish-speaking world, but also a city with a unique linguistic wealth, and on which we are placing special emphasis in the links between literature, contemporary art, design, and culture.”

Among the Spanish authors attending as part of the Barcelona delegation are Xavier Bosch, Javier Cercas, María Dueñas, Cristina Fernández Cubas, Andreu Martin, Eduardo Mendoza, and Carme Riera. Irish author Colm Tóibín, who lived in Barcelona in the 1970s, will also be attending, along with Mexican novelist Juan Pablo Villalobos, who currently resides there. (For PW’s q&a with Villalobos, see p. 54.)

“We will be seeking to widen the frontiers of books, without losing sight of the FIL’s essence: the encounters between authors and readers,” Schulz adds. “And we will also continue to internationalize the fair, with a greater number of countries represented.”

Other authors whose attendance is confirmed include Bolivia’s Edmundo Paz Soldán, China’s Xue Mo, Cuba’s Leonardo Padura, El Salvador’s Horacio Castellaños Moya, Italy’s Donatella Di Pietrantonio, Mexico’s Cristina Rivera Garza, Nigeria’s Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Northern Irish author Jan Carson.

Barcelona’s pavilion within FIL, designed by architecture studio Fàbric, is inspired by the colonnaded squares of the Catalan capital, and will comprise a 12,000-sq.-ft. space featuring an auditorium for 120 attendees at a series of talks, book presentations, and panel discussions, as well as a bookstore stacked with more than 10,000 titles.

Programs

Now in its 39th year, the fair kicks off this year on Saturday with an international translation and interpretation congress, featuring keynote presentations by experienced translators from Mexico and abroad, which extends into Sunday with a series of translation workshops.

This year’s FIL will include its second-annual one-day audiobook forum on Tuesday, reflecting the growing importance of the audio format in the Spanish-speaking world, while this year’s two-day program for publishing professionals, running Tuesday and Wednesday, will focus on children’s literature.

The crowd-drawing comics and graphic novels pavilion opens on Thursday, with 60 stands and the presence of 140 authors and illustrators, while the sprawling children’s section, FIL Niños, will include booths, workshops, and other events featuring authors from Barcelona, Argentina, Italy, Mexico, Poland and Uruguay, as well as theatrical performances.

Also included as annual staples of the FIL are an international congress on Mexican literature, a poetry salon featuring poets from 10 countries, an international forum on editorial design, an international booksellers’ forum, and an international

ibrarians’ congress. Additionally, the FIL Science and FIL Thought programs will bring together intellectuals and
scientists from across Ibero-America, with the latter this year to feature Spanish former prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, former Barcelona mayor Ada Colau, and Mexican investigative journalist Carmen Aristegui, among others.

Finally, the Latinoamérica Viva program will showcase contemporary literature from the continent, the Nombrar a Centroamérica program will highlight the writing of Central America, and the Festival de las Letras Europeas will focus on European literature—each of which will feature panel discussions with visiting authors.

Prizes

The annual $150,000 FIL Literary Award in Romance Languages will this year be presented to Lebanese French novelist, essayist, and journalist Amin Maalouf, who will deliver a keynote to an audience of more than 1,000 attendees during the fair, in addition to participating in several panel discussions.

Announcing Maalouf’s award, jury member Carmen Alemany Bay, a professor of literature in Alicante, Spain, said the Beirut-born author’s “humanist thinking illuminates our era of conflicts between cultures and memories, and reminds us that hope lies in the recognition of our shared heritage.”

FIL will also award its Indigenous Literatures of the Americas award on Friday to Mexico’s Victoria Díaz, an author of short stories in the Tzotzil language of the southern state of Chiapas, who was among candidates writing in 10 languages spoken in Mexico, Ecuador, and Peru, and for which she will be awarded 300,000 pesos ($16,300) and publication of her story collection.

The annual Publishing Merit Award will be presented to the Association of University Publishers of Latin America and the Caribbean, which was founded in Lima in 1987 and represents more than 400 academic publishers from across the region.

Uruguay’s Fernanda Trías will be presented with the $10,000 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, which recognizes a woman author of a Spanish-language novel published during the previous year, on Wednesday. Trías also won in 2021, and other past recipients include Argentina’s Gabriela Cabezón Cámara and Mexico’s Daniela Tarazona.

For full details of this year’s program, consult the FIL website at fil.com.mx/ingles.

Adam Critchley is a Mexico-based journalist and translator.

Read more from our Guadalajara International Book Fair Preview.

Barcelona Gets Its Flowers at FIL 2025

Primero Sueño Is Just Getting Started

A Writer’s Homecoming