Portugal says goodbye to the FIL of Guadalajara and gives way to India
Portugal today passed the baton to India, which will be the first Asian guest of honor of the 2019 edition of the Mexican International Book Fair (FIL) of Guadalajara, considered the largest in Latin America.
The exchange of the courier took place at the closing ceremony of the fair in which the Prime Minister of Portugal, Antonio Costa, symbolically delivered a traditional ceramic piece to the Ambassador of India in Mexico.
The Indian letters will show from the millennial texts of Vedas, the oldest in Indian history to the works of the narrator R.K. Narayan and Rabindranath Tagore, first Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to an author outside Europe in 1913.
The Ambassador of India in Mexico, Muktesh Pardeshi, affirmed that the cultural presence of his country in Mexico has experienced a new level in recent months ", having been guest of honor at the Cervantino Festival in the neighboring state of Guanajuato.
He said that during the next edition of the IDF "there will be a memorable presence of India" that will be "a milestone" to bring the peoples of India and Mexico closer together.
Your participation as a guest country will be organized by the National Book Trust agency, which has carried out the New Dehli Book Fair and will show the editorial growth it has experienced in recent years.
"India is the sixth largest publisher of books in the world and second, after the United States, as a country publisher of books in English, its publishing industry is estimated at 67,000 million dollars in the last year," said Pardeshi.
He recalled that this year the Indian government celebrates the 150th anniversary of the birth of the leader Mahatma Gandhi, who cited one of his phrases: "Let our lives be open books for all to study."
In turn, the Mexican Raúl Padilla, president of FIL, said that India has "a mysterious thousand-year-old culture, full of lights" that constitutes "a door in time that evokes the past, while at the same time future".
This country is "synonymous with amazement and an explosion of colors that permeate the senses", which will bring to Mexicans the best of their music and their "long and exciting" literary tradition.
This edition of the FIL brought together more than 819,000 visitors, 2,280 publishers from 47 countries and was the setting for the presentation of 630 editorial novelties.
During nine days 750 writers attended hundreds of literary activities, and 20 tributes and awards were made, among which the FIL Prize of Literature in Romance Languages to the Uruguayan poet Ida Vitale.
In the business area, the fair was attended by 150 publishing companies from 29 countries that brought together 328 literary agents who managed to close contracts and start new negotiations.
The 32nd edition of this literary festival gave way to three new literary sections, one of them called "Libros al gusto", dedicated to gastronomy books, as well as the "Writers in the ring" forum that brings together eight new Mexican narrators and the encounter of black novel that counted on the presence of the Cuban Leonardo Padura.
In addition the second edition of the Hall of the comic and the graphic novel was carried out.
The FIL of Guadalajara will conclude this Sunday with a concert by the Spanish tenor Plácido Domingo who will direct the Philharmonic Orchestra of Jalisco.
