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Frankfurt Fellows celebrate on the Main
A pleasant cruise up Frankfurt’s Main river on the aptly -named Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was in order Monday night for those lucky individuals chosen to participate in the Frankfurt’s successful Fellowship and Invitation Programmes.
The two professional development programmes aim to bring people to Frankfurt who otherwise wouldn’t make it, either because they’re not quite senior enough, or because they lack the financial wherewithal.
In the case of the Fellowship Programme, 16 up-and-coming publishing professionals from 13 countries have spent a month in Germany learning about the German book trade, culminating in the Frankfurt Book Fair itself.
The 25 publishers brought to Germany as part of the Invitation Programme are generally those from less-developed book markets—from Africa, Asia, Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe—who otherwise would struggle to exhibit at the Fair. The Frankfurt Book Fair and Germany’s Federal Foreign Office fund their visit to the fair, and also provide them with exhibition space (in Hall 5.0 E 926).
Talking to one Egyptian publisher on the river cruise gave me not only a sense of the challenges book publishers in that country face, but also put the complaints of some western publishers in some perspective. Egypt has no supply chain for books as such, and few general bookshops. Publishers sell their own books through their own retail outlets and sometimes sell the books of other publishers through largely ad hoc arrangements. There is no review culture for books, and so books sell principally by word-of-mouth. In spite of this, the American University in Cairo Press had great success with Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building. Aswany, now published around the world, was also on the boat.
Neither the Fellowship or Invitation Programme are as well known as they could be. Those lucky enough to participate in the programmes say they derive an enormous amount of professional and personal enjoyment from them. If you’re not at Frankfurt this year, perhaps you should be thinking of applying to one of these programmes for 2009.
Tags: Fellows, Invitation Programme
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