The largest book fair has finished its work in Moscow

MIFF-2022 testifies that Russia remains the most reading and publishing country

On September 5, the 35th Moscow International Book Fair finished its work in the capital’s Gostiny Dvor. For five days of “hybrid” activity, the MIFF attracted the attention of one and a half million readers, of which 30 thousand visited the exhibition space in person, the rest became viewers of broadcasts on the Internet.

The book is a spiritual and intellectual product, and it is difficult to talk about it in the language of numbers, but let Exupery forgive me: 350 events, 300 publishing houses, 28 Russian regions and six foreign countries – this is an impressive arithmetic and geography of the event. It would seem that political changes on the world map should make themselves felt, and we really see on the list of guests friends from the CIS – Belarus, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and from abroad – Iran, China, Iraq and Vietnam. But here among them publishers from Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the USA “got in”, which cannot but inspire optimism.

So what is the MIBF, if not an almost endless counter where you could find an album with reproductions of paintings, a collection of works by Brodsky or Kushner, a scientific dictionary, a children’s picture book, or new comics and manga? In fact, the fair is designed not only to satisfy the need for a book as a material object, but also to erase the line separating readers and writers. That is why the organizers paid so much attention to “live” communication with the headliners of the literary process. We know that meetings these days were held with such bestselling authors as Pavel Basinsky, Yuri Polyakov, Alexei Varlamov, Denis Dragunsky, Anna and Sergey Litvinov, Zakhar Prilepin, Sergey Lukyanenko, Leah Arden, and with the leading creators of the detective genre – Nikolai Svechin, Daria Dontsova, Alexandra Marinina. And there were also famous artists (say, Nikas Safronov), TV presenters, actors, stand-up artists, sports stars, coaches. Also at the MIFF, journalist Rafael Huseynov, together with the legend of national journalism Roy Medvedev, presented the book “Putin’s Way”, declared as “a book about the most popular politician of the 21st century.”

It is also important that, according to tradition, the MIFF has become the place where translators’ congresses are held, the winners of the national competition “Book of the Year” and other awards designed to encourage writers and publishers are announced.

The children’s program was also rich and vibrant, bringing together, probably, all the best created in the country for young readers with the widest age coverage – from babies to teenagers, who were prepared not only books and encyclopedias, but also performances, as well as filmstrips, voiced by actresses theater and cinema.

The organizers of the MIFF also thought about the prospects, as evidence we can cite the forum “KNIGABYT. The future of the book”, which is a reserve for tomorrow. And it should be cloudless for the industry, since we remain the most publishing and reading country.