Children's' Publishing · Bologna Book Fair, Italy
- David Salariya
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
Updated: 21 hours ago
I'll know it when I see it
The Bologna Children's Book Fair - what it is, why it matters, and why war hasn't kept anyone away
A headline in The Bookseller, four words and a date, the kind of thing you scroll past without thinking.
Except I didn't, I read it, and then I read it again, and then I realised I couldn't quite remember when the Bologna Children's Book Fair had stopped feeling like the centre of my year.
It used to be, our son came to his first Bologna when he was just two - which tells you something about how completely the fair once ran through my working life. We'd go south afterwards: Sorrento or Taormina, before school started and the calendar stopped belonging to us, that was a long time ago.
The Bologna Book Fair is on this week - 33,000 people, ninety-five countries, the same exhibition centre in the same March or April city - and it is doing so while the world outside its walls is in a fairly grim place. Two wars, tariffs, Trump, and of course, AI. An industry that talks about data and strategy and market trends, but which still, at its core, runs on something closer to instinct and hope.
Most people working in children's publishing get up in the morning and think: perhaps what I'm doing is going to make a difference to some child somewhere. As motivations go, it's cannot be the worst one.
The Bologna Children's Book Fair
There is a particular line I heard at the Bologna Children's Book Fair that has stayed with me longer than any rights deal, any trend forecast, any panel discussion about the future of children's books. Ask an editor, quite plainly, what they are looking for. They smile - pleasant, unguarded, almost relieved to be asked - and say:
“I don’t know. But I’ll know it when I see it.”
The problem is not that editors don't know what they're looking for. It's whether, when they finally see it, they still have the courage to say yes.
What is Bologna?
Since 1963, Bologna has been the place where the global children's publishing industry gathers each spring. Now held over four days (it used to be much longer) at the Bologna Exhibition Centre in northern Italy, it is the world's leading trade fair dedicated to children's and young people's publishing - the engine room where rights deals are struck that determine which books get translated, licensed, and placed into classrooms and homes across the world.
It is now effectively three events running simultaneously: the Bologna Children's Book Fair (BCBF) for children's publishing; BolognaBookPlus (BBPlus), an extension for general trade publishing; and the Bologna Licensing Trade Fair for Kids, covering subsidiary rights in brands, animation, and film. Together they have made Bologna a hub not just for books, but for the entire creative ecosystem surrounding stories for young readers - from illustrated picture books to TV adaptations to licensed merchandise.
The awards presented at Bologna carry real weight: The BolognaRagazzi Awards honour the year's finest illustrated children's books across fiction, non-fiction, comics, and debut work. The Hans Christian Andersen Award - the highest international recognition in children's literature - is announced from the fair floor. For emerging illustrators, it is the one place in the world where pinning work to the entrance wall might genuinely change a career.
It certainly did for me. Chester Fisher at Franklin Watts saw my work at Bologna in 1990 - I was showing the Inside Story books, having just finished the first three titles, with new projects ready: Timelines, The X-Ray Picture Book series, and others. Franklin Watts ordered those series, and I went on to produce many more over the years, before eventually setting out as a publisher with my own imprints: Book House, Scribblers, and Scribo.
The numbers
Attendance has grown every year since the disruption of the pandemic, reaching a new high in 2025 — and 2026 is expected to match it.
2022 –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 21,432
2023 –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 28,894
2024 –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 31,700
2025 –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 33,318
Exhibiting nations
95
countries & regions, 2025
Rights-trading countries
56
via BolognaBookPlus
Award submissions
4,120
titles from 73 countries, 2026
Online reach
2M+
pageviews from 180 countries
Thirteen new markets joined the 2025 fair for the first time, among them Albania, Azerbaijan, Ecuador, Georgia, Iceland, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. BolognaBookPlus sold out for the first time in its history, with a waiting list. For the 2026 BolognaRagazzi Awards alone, publishers from Ecuador, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Rwanda submitted entries for the first time.
What happens in those halls
Bologna is not a festival open to the public. It is a trade fair - which means it is the end point of months, sometimes years, of work. Projects developed in isolation, refined, packaged, costed, second-guessed. Compressed, at Bologna, into a sequence of half-hour meetings, each carrying the faint, unspoken question: - Is this anything?
Publishers, literary agents, illustrators, translators, rights directors, licensors, film scouts, and editorial directors sit across tables from one another. They are not browsing. They are deciding - which books to acquire for their markets, which illustrations to champion, which voices to carry across languages. A deal struck in Bologna can put a picture book into sixty countries, a rejection can end a project that took years to develop, and of course there are always the companies quietly circling, picking up ideas.
Publishing prefers to describe itself in the language of strategy: lists, market gaps, trend forecasts, data, and yet in those halls, the language shifts. What is actually happening is pattern recognition under pressure - shaped by taste, fear, experience, and the faint dread of getting it wrong.
Publishing is not, and has never been, a fully rational business.
War, geopolitics, and the 2026 fair
The 63rd Bologna Children's Book Fair is running this week - 13 to 16 April 2026 - and more than 33,000 visitors are expected. That figure would match last year's record. War has not kept anyone away.
The fair's director, Elena Pasoli, has acknowledged that it will once again take place against a backdrop of geopolitical tension: Ukraine, the Middle East, shifting trade relationships, the shadow of American tariffs over international publishing. She has turned down repeated calls to create a special BolognaRagazzi Award category for books about war and peace, seemingly resistant to the idea that publishing's response to conflict should be to commodify it.
Ukraine
Ukrainian artist Maria Haiduk, 19 years old, is the youngest-ever winner of the Bologna–Fundación SM International Illustration Award. Her illustrated book, based on a Ukrainian fairy tale, is given a solo exhibition at the 2026 fair. The Illustrators Exhibition itself — marking its 60th anniversary - received submissions from 96 countries and regions.
Middle East
The fair has barred the Israeli Institute for Hebrew Literature from the 2026 event, a decision the institute described as an act of cultural boycott - a direct consequence of the conflict in Gaza making its presence felt in the halls of a children's book fair.
Among those attending this week, the mood reported is one of heightened purpose rather than dampened spirits. One agent noted that the fair “feels especially important right now, given the state of the world - it can offer a rare chance for children's book people to all come together to continue inspiring young readers to have a wide world view.”
It is a telling sentiment. The books that endure - the ones that define childhoods, shape readers, linger for decades - are rarely the ones that neatly answered a brief. They are the ones that made someone, somewhere, sit up and say: This is different. This might be trouble. Let's do it anyway.
That requires not just instinct, but nerve. And nerve is harder to maintain in a system that has become increasingly cautious, increasingly data-aware, increasingly conscious of failure. Yet here - in a city in northern Italy, in April, year after year - thirty-three thousand people still make the journey to find out if they have it.
Bologna in 2017
My last Bologna Children's Book Fair was in 2017 - though I'd first walked those halls in the early 1980s, and in 1990 I was showing the Inside Story books (which later became The Spectacular Visual Guides), pitching Timelines and the X-Ray Picture Book series to whoever would look. Twenty-seven years is a long relationship with a place.
What changed wasn't my feeling about publishing, it was a growing recognition of where I was actually useful within it. The rhythm of Bologna had always demanded the same thing: arrive with new work. That meant spending the first months of each year generating projects - ideas developed, designed, packaged - before the fair itself consumed the next phase in meetings and pitches. For years that cycle felt right, but gradually I noticed that the people who could take that work to the fair and sell it were simply better at it than I was. The work itself was the thing I could do, the selling had become something I was doing out of habit, not out of skill.
At the same time, after years of building and running a company, the balance of the work had shifted - more time managing the machinery, less time in the creative part. Bologna had become a fixed point in a relentless forward motion: pitch, reject, generate, repeat. There was no natural pause built into it.
Around 2017, I began going skiing late in the season - exactly the weeks I would once have been in Bologna. It wasn't escape so much as recalibration, a deliberate step back from the endless demand for the next thing, and towards work that was slower, more considered, and entirely my own.
Which raises an obvious question. If I stopped going in 2017, why am
I writing about it in 2026?
Partly because these notes are becoming something - a loose account of a life in publishing, assembled out of sequence, the way memory actually works. Bologna keeps appearing in it because Bologna was always a kind of reckoning: a place where you found out, once a year, whether what you'd made was anything.
And partly, if I'm honest, because you don't entirely leave the things that shaped you, you just stop showing up.
Comments