Italy guest of honor at the Tunis International Book Fair

Mutual knowledge, exaltation of similarities, valorization of differences: these are the coordinates of Italy’s participation as guest of honor in the thirty-eighth edition of the Tunis International Book Fair, from Friday 19th to Sunday 28th April at the Kram Exhibition Center. Guided by the suggestions of the theme of the Italian cultural program, Mediterranean soulsome of the protagonists of the cultural scene will offer an exemplary cross-section of the literary current affairs of contemporary Italy in relation to the context that hosts it.

Not monologues, therefore, but dialogues, in which we (re)know, each in the other, the expressive characteristics, the soul, of the common Mediterranean identity. Participation in Tunis fits, opening it, into an annual calendar particularly rich in events , which in May includes Italy’s participation as guest of honor at the Warsaw International Book Fair and, in October, at the Buchmesse in Frankfurt, the main publishing event in Europe and in the world. The guest authors in Tunis are Roberto Alajmo, Marino Bartoletti, Maria Borio, Pierfranco Bruni, Alfonso Campisi, Matteo Collura, Giuseppe Conte, Silvia Finzi, Roberto Mercadini, Claudio Pozzani, Tiziana Romanin, Evelina Santangelo and Marcello Veneziani. Their meetings will be animated by: Sonia Ben Salem, Alfio Bonaccorso, Hatem Bourial, Rosy Candiani, Meriem Dhouib, Raimondo Fassa, Antonella Ferrara, Mohamed Menzli and Fabio Ruggirello.

The cultural program, coordinated by the Italian Cultural Institute of Tunis, AIE and CEPELL, will unfold through meetings, dialogues, round tables and workshops for children and teenagers. The events will take place inside the Italian Pavilion, an area of ​​approximately 220 square meters set up by ICE Agenzia in collaboration with AIE, where there will be stations dedicated to the Italian publishers present at the fair, a bookshop curated by the Tunisian bookshop Al Kitab which will sell books by Italian authors in Italian, Arabic and French to the public and the exhibition of the titles from the IBBY Italia 2023 Honor List.

The Italian program of the fair will be inaugurated with the presentation of the AIE report on Italian publishing and will continue with the meetings of the Italian publishing houses present (17 in total) with the professionals of the Tunisian publishing scene, including the fifty local publishing houses involved and the press.