Anyone who visited the National Palace of Culture these days found a huge sea of books – the Christmas book fair had conquered the space of the enormous building. In the course of 6 days books were literally overflowing from all the stands across the palace. More than 200 publishing houses attracted the audience with various titles of Bulgarian and foreign authors. One could see both classical literature and modern editions placed together and provoking with titles like Who Rules The World?, The Mason Myth, and Dead Sea’s Manuscripts. The fair traditionally provides a chance to famous Bulgarian authors who have recently published, to meet their fans. The visitors took the opportunity to talk with Thracian tombs’ researcher Prof. Nikolay Ovcharov, tackling his new book, dedicated to travels and archaeology. At the same time media expert Prof. Lilia Raicheva presented her book named The TV Phenomenon.

The meeting with Hassan Blasim, one of the brightest representatives of contemporary Arab literature was the one which caused the biggest interest. The writer was a guest of an International Literature Festival as part of the fair’s agenda, in order to present his second short story collection – the Iraqi Christ. Mr. Blasim was the first Arab writer to win the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. 15 years ago he crossed the Bulgarian border as a refugee on his way to West Europe. Freedom of speech is our most precious possession, he reminded, adding that the dictatorship regime of late Saddam Hussein had wiped out in the course of the past 50 years several generations of talented writers and poets.

Another talented author, presented by a book at the fair comes from a family of Bulgarian emigrants. His name is Ilia Troyanov and he lives in Germany, but the audience here knows him well. This year he presented his latest novel, named Power and Resistance, already included in the 2015 rankings of best German language novel.

The lyrical aspect of the migration, borders and self-determination of personality were tackled by some of the youngest authors during the Literature Festival. The fair also had its musical side – the LaText band which combines delicacy of poetry with the energy of rock music. Petar Chukhov was one of the founders and lyric writers of the band. Here is more from him on the fest:

“My poetry couldn’t be named ‘socially engaged’. It rather tackles the issues of man – loneliness, love, losing the sense of life. These everyday subjects always carry their pain inside and everyone goes through something like this at a certain point. The interesting thing I spotted at the event this year was that the poets were definitely younger – aged around 20, while prose writers were more mature people, aged 30 or more. Obviously prose requires a more mature vision. Furthermore – most of those persons had technical education, not humanitarian. There were people there with degrees in biology, physics, architecture… I found it curious to see the fine mixture of scientific intellect and literature talent,” Mr. Chukhov says.

English version: Zhivko Stanchev