OUR Thessaloniki International Book Fair returns for its annual meeting with fellow scribes on May 4-7, expanding its participation, program, space and cooperation with the Greek and international publishing market. Four buildings and 14 halls of the Heexpo complex will host more than 600 Greek and foreign experts in this field and at the same time almost 500 events with the participation of at least 1200 speakers. This year’s award will be American Literature, with 22 publishers and prominent US authors represented on the American booth, including author Claire Messud; the aim is to draw attention to contemporary literary voices and, in general, to book buying from the other side of the Atlantic.

However, the presence of France this year will also be important, as seven writers will be participating, including two (Mackenzie Orsel and Mohamed Mougar-Sar) who have received the Prix Goncourt. The sections “Stories from Europe” and “Voices from the Balkans” are also interesting. The former highlights new literary talents from the Old Continent, inviting European Union Literature Prize-winning writers, while the latter brings together renowned writers from our neighborhood, such as the 2023 Booker Prize-nominated Bulgarian Georgy Gospodinov.

through the eyes of a courier

New release from Polis publishing and Christos Oikonomou, author of the highly acclaimed “Good Things Will Come from the Sea” and “Something Happens, You’ll See” among others, who returns with “Tell Her”. Here it is the story of “a courier who roams like the wind over snow-capped mountains and silvery seas, along dirt roads, endless, without beginning or end, without marks and engravings, in maisonettes with internal elevators and apartment buildings. without elevators, delivering goods to good and bad people, rude and kind, tortured and well-mannered – people who look ready to cry, and others who don’t seem to know what it’s like to cry. A story told in a language that sometimes protests and sometimes is silent, rejoices and shrinks, hides and reveals itself, struggling to follow the bloody footprints left by people and things in the snow,” as we read on the back cover of the book. Christos Oikonomou has been awarded, among other things, the State Literature Prize for his previous work.