The 2023 Turin International Book Fair (Salone Internazionale del Libro di Torino) will be held from May 18 to 22 at the Lingotto Fiere convention center in Turin, Italy. The book fair is the largest in Italy and attracts over 200,000 visitors each year. The fair offers more than 2,000 events in 40 venues around the city and includes a track for publishing professionals, and a robust rights center—which covers book, film, and audio rights sales—expects to host upwards of 400 participants from more than 20 countries.

This year’s theme is “Through the Looking Glass,” and the fair will honor the Italian region of Sardinia and the country of Albania as guests of honor. Events included book signings, readings, panel discussions, workshops, and concerts. There are also special exhibitions and areas dedicated to children's books, comics, and graphic novels.

Highlights of this year’s fair include an opening talk by Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich and numerous celebrations to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Italian author Italo Calvino. Among the authors participating are Spaniards Fernando Aramburu, Javier Castillo and Javier Cercas; Basque author Bernardo Atxaga; American’s Peter Cameron, Michael Frank, and Andrew Sean Greer; French author Victoria Mas; and Nigerian Nobel Prize-winner Wole Soyinka.

The fair has also partnered with the Frankfurt Book Fair to launch the Aficionado Award, a new prize to honor an innovative collaboration in publishing. It will be presented on Wednesday, May 17. The finalists are:

  • The Aké Arts and Book Festival in Lagos, Nigeria, which was nominated for “the wide-ranging efforts made to support the promotion of African literature, both locally and abroad.”
  • The book magazine The Passenger, which is a collaboration between Milan publishing house Iperborea and New York’s Europa Editions, acknowledged “for its originality and for the way it embodies an international collaboration, collecting the best new writing, photography, and reportage from around the world.”
  • Meridian Czernowitz, a literary foundation and poetry festival in the Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi that focuses on European-Ukrainian relations and has sustained itself in the midst of the ongoing war.

The 2023 event will be the last for the fair director Nicola Lagioia, who has run the run fair since 2017. author and television presenter Annalena Benini has been announced as the new director starting next year, with an appointment to run through 2026.

Lagioia, whose new novel, The City of the Living is being published in an English translation by Europa Editions in October, said “I arrived when the fair was in a crisis and am happy to be leaving it in a state of stability and renewed vigor.” In an interview with PW, Lagioia noted that the Italian book business is nearly “always the same—neither up nor down,” though the past few years have seen a spike in reading as a result of lockdowns from the pandemic. “It was up 15% in 2021, which was the best result in a decade, but dropped 3% in 2022. Let’s see if we can sustain the higher number.”

In March, Lagioia launched a new online literary and culture magazine, Lucy, which along with his own writing, will command his attention.