BOLOGNA CHILDREN’S BOOK FAIR: THE 2024-2025 GRAND TOUR BEGINS

The Bologna Grand Tour, the travelling autumn tour through which Bologna Children’s Book Fair (BCBF) showcases its best initiatives to the world, is about to begin its fourth consecutive edition, bolstering the Fair’s relationships with foreign operators, promoting their links with Italian publishing and expanding the network of international relations ahead of the next edition of the Fair (in Bologna from 31 March to 3 April 2025).

BCBF always works to support developments and intercept trends in the publishing sector: this attention has led, in recent years, to the creation of the Comics Corner and the TV/Film Rights Centre, business areas developed in the wake of the increasingly rapid growth of the comics sector and of the sale of audiovisual rights, and of the BolognaRagazzi CrossMedia Award, the prize that rewards excellence in projects that intersect publishing content and other media. To these will be added, starting from the 2025 edition, the new Games Business Centre (in collaboration with Frankfurter Buchmesse), a meeting area for publishers and gaming industry professionals.

The focus of this fourth Grand Tour will be on these projects, which the Bologna Fair intends to bring to the attention of the international public through its participation, for the first time, in two of the leading fairs in these sectors: the Cartoon Forum in Toulouse and the Festival International de la Bande Dessinée d'Angoulême.

Also for this edition of the tour BCBF will be flanked by BolognaBookPlus (BBPlus), the initiative specifically for generalist publishing organised in collaboration with the Association of Italian Publishers (AIE), and by Bologna Licensing Trade Fair/Kids (BLTF/Kids), focussed on the relationship between the worlds of publishing and licensing.

Organised with the support and collaboration of ITA - the Italian Trade Agency and the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, the 2024-2025 Grand Tour will first head to the Cartoon Forum in Toulouse (from 16 to 19 September), the reference event focused on the development of TV animation projects. There, BCBF will be bringing a delegation of 7 Italian publishers to take part in business meetings with foreign operators and producers in the audiovisual sector. The programme for the Forum, in fact, is structured around pitching sessions in which producers will be able to present their projects to more than 1000 broadcasters, investors and other potential partners from 40 different countries. BCBF’s participation at the Cartoon Forum also represents an important opportunity to promote the new TV/Film Rights Centre, the business area for the trade in rights in the publishing and audiovisual sectors that was launched successfully at the 2024 edition of the Bologna Children’s Book Fair.

Second stop will be the Frankfurter Buchmesse (from 16 to 20 October), where BCBF will also take part in the Italy Country Guest of Honour 2024 programme with several initiatives, including the exhibition in the Italian Pavilion ‘Matite giovani tra illustrazione e fumetto’ specifically for young talents of contemporary Italian illustration. Following, the China Shanghai International Children’s Book Fair (from 15 to 17 November), co-organised by BolognaFiere and an annual opportunity to engage with one of the world’s most flourishing publishing markets and which, together with BCBF, this year will be celebrating the 700th anniversary of Marco Polo’s death; the Guadalajara International Book Fair (from 30 November to 8 December), a reference point for the entire Latin American and Spanish-speaking publishing world. Finally, the Angoulême International Comics Festival (from 29 January to 2 February 2025), one of the world’s most prestigious comics events and a precious opportunity to promote Comics Corner, the business area created by BCBF in 2022 to keep up with the constant growth of the comics sector.

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