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.
