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Georgia will be the Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2018.
The Minister of Culture and Monument Protection of Georgia, Guram Odisharia, Georgian ambassador Lado Chanturia and Juergen Boos, director of Frankfurt Book Fair, signed the contracts in Berlin this week.
Boos said: “We look forward to welcoming this culturally exciting country as our Guest of Honour in 2018. It’s particularly appealing for us to be able to support the Georgian publishing scene in their preparations over the next four years, precisely because we have never worked with such a ‘young’ book market before.”
The Georgian book market is small, with about 70 publishers, 100 bookshops and 10 wholesalers, but there has been steady growth and it is becoming more professional, the Frankfurt Book Fair said. The number of available book copies from 2008 to 2011 alone has almost quadrupled, to 7.7 million copies. In 2011, the annual turnover of the book market was around £16.5m. Children’s books and fiction make up most of the sales, taking 28% and 26% market shares respectively. German publishers currently sell about 20 to 30 licenses per year to Georgia.
The book market’s development has contributed to its selection as Guest of Honour 2018, as has the energy of its entire cultural sector, including film and music. The appearance is being organised on the Georgian side by Ministry of Culture, which will work closely together with the programme that promotes translation and Georgian literature abroad and the Book Publishers and Booksellers Association.
As part of the wide-ranging Guest of Honour events programme, Georgia will present its culture and literature at the world’s largest Book Fair and throughout Germany. Since the founding of the Frankfurt Book Fair’s Guest of Honour programme in 1976, 29 countries and cultural regions have already been featured. Finland will be Guest of Honour 2014, followed by Indonesia in 2015.