(Paris) With Quebec as guest of honor, the Paris Book Festival returns Friday with the desire to rejuvenate its audience, against a backdrop of young people’s disaffection for reading.
Some 100,000 people are expected for this new edition of the festival, which ends on Sunday.
Considered until recently as “a complementary market”, where French publishing houses achieve 2% to 5% of their turnover, Quebec owes its spotlight not only to economic considerations or to a simple linguistic proximity, assures Jean-Baptiste Passé, general director of the festival.
“We can trace the recognition of Quebec literature back to the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, but in recent years we have witnessed such a deployment that we can speak of true editorial maturity,” he adds, referring to the 175 houses publishing and 6000 new releases annually in the Canadian province.
In 1999, the Paris Book Fair had already placed Quebec at the heart of its program.
A rejuvenated audience
This year, 77 publishing houses and 42 Quebec authors are invited to the festival. The choice to participate is also not insignificant, the Quebec International Book Fair taking place on the same dates.
Emerging artists are announced in Paris, such as Éric Chacour (What I know about you) and Gabrielle Filteau-Chiba (Cabin, Bivouac), but also international stars like Dany Laferrière, the first Canadian to join the Académie française.
The author of Haitian origin received the Medici Prize in 2009 for his novel The enigma of the return. A distinction that he shares with Kevin Lambert, a rising star who won the December and Medici prizes in 2023 for his third novel, May our joy remainbut who will not be present for this Parisian festival.
On the other hand, the novelist and poet Hélène Dorion, the first Quebec author to be enrolled in the French baccalaureate program with her collection of poetry My forestswill be there, after having toured high schools in France.
Youth will also be one of the subjects of the festival, where almost half of the visitors were under 25 last year and while a study published Tuesday in France shows that the practice of reading is gradually eroding among under 20s.
Faced with this challenge, publishers are carefully monitoring new practices. Starting with the success of the hashtag #booktok on the TikTok application, which brings together millions of references, while the study by the National Book Center (CNL) notes that 53% of young people say they get information about books that interest them via social networks.