Lisbon residents know the ritual well: from the end of May to mid-June, Parque Eduardo VII turns into the country’s biggest bookshop, a paradise for any book lover, with tens of thousands of titles to choose from. This year, the Book Fair has 350 stands run by 128 participants, which together represent around 900 publishing imprints.
According to the organisers, the last five editions have attracted an average of 850,000 visitors. Days such as the 4 June public holiday, when a midweek day off coincided with fine weather, will certainly have helped ensure that the average is reached again this year, if not surpassed.
While a long queue of young people waited patiently for an autograph and a quick chat with German-American author S.T. Ashman, others wandered around Praça Leya, where several generations and very different styles of writers mixed, from Hugo Van Der Ding and Rodrigo Guedes de Carvalho to Daniel Sampaio, Cristina Norton, Fernando Pinto Amaral, Nuno Rogeiro and the acclaimed Angolan author Pepetela, winner of the Camões Prize in 1997.
“From one year to the next, there are more and more people, and that’s good. It’s very good, because people say that no one reads any more and that there are fewer and fewer readers. That is partly true, but on the other hand there are forms of resistance, so to speak, and this is one example. It’s a celebration, exactly as we like it to be. Books are a celebration,” Pepetela tells Euronews.
For Carla Pais, a Portuguese writer living in France, the trip to Portugal to take part in the Book Fair and other events coincides with the launch of her latest novel, A Sombra das Árvores no Inverno, which won last year’s Leya Prize (Portugal’s biggest award for unpublished books), and comes shortly after she also brought out a collection of poetry, A Brutalidade do Movimento Conjugado.
“I’m very pleasantly surprised to see so many people from so many different generations, with children, older people, parents, grandparents and grandchildren,” Carla Pais tells Euronews. “Different generations coming together and sharing the same space, which is this passion for books and literature.”
The undisputed highlight of the day was the presence of US author Siri Hustvedt to present the Portuguese edition of Fantasmas, the memoir in which she looks back on more than 40 years of life together with one of the most important writers of recent decades, Paul Auster, who died in 2024. The presentation, led by Hustvedt herself and her translator Tânia Ganho (a writer in her own right), drew one of the biggest crowds at this fair, with many people forced to stand or sit on the ground because there were so few seats.
Paulo Santos, 54, a public sector manager, is an avid reader of both Auster and Hustvedt, and didn’t want to miss the chance to exchange a few words, however brief, with the author. “Siri is one of the links that keeps Auster present, beyond his extensive body of work,” he tells Euronews. “After Auster’s death, I felt the need to explore Siri’s work, even though that is still at a very early stage, as I have only read one of her books so far, The Sorrows of an American. Auster is a writer who has accompanied me for many years and whose literary atmosphere seduces me; I have read and re-read almost all his work. Siri’s writing has some points in common, bringing together memory, identity and reflection,” he adds.
Now in its 96th edition, the Lisbon Book Fair is organised by the Portuguese Publishers and Booksellers Association (APEL), chaired by Miguel Pauseiro: “There will always be someone who says they are selling less than last year and others who say they are selling more. But what matters to us is that this should be a moment of celebration, a celebration of books, so that books become central to our lives,” Pauseiro tells Euronews.
APEL’s management has not gone without criticism, following the petition launched by DNL Convergência (source in Portuguese), a small publishing group that, in addition to its own imprints, also distributes books for several other small independent publishers, contesting its announced exclusion from this year’s edition.
The space occupied by a group of four large publishing houses – Leya, Porto Editora, Penguin and Presença – does not go unnoticed by visitors to the fair. Pauseiro rejects the criticism, noting that some of these groups represent around 15 imprints: “I can assure you that the big groups, as they are called, have a presence at the Lisbon Book Fair that is below their share of the market, whether in terms of sales or of titles published,” he says.
“We want more, that I can assure you. We want more publishers at the fair, we want more authors, we want more titles. But we have to create the conditions for that. The Book Fair is reaching the limits of its structure in terms of how much space it can occupy in Parque Eduardo VII, and that will force APEL to make choices, but it will also force publishers themselves to make choices,” he adds. “Right now, we have events here involving more than 1,100 authors, so there is no shortage of diversity.”
This year, there are five new participants at the Book Fair.
As for those registered for the 2025 edition, four did not renew their registration and six had their stand applications rejected — three because they mainly sell games and other products that are not really books, and another three for reasons the APEL president did not wish to go into. On those cases, which include DNL Convergência, Pauseiro insists there is no bad blood: “There is no acrimony, no animosity, no hard feelings. In future, we will see how we can bring these participants back on board, provided that they comply with the criteria and rules of the Lisbon Book Fair,” he says.
The Lisbon Book Fair runs until Sunday, 14 June.