Marie-Madeleine Rigopoulos, director of the Paris Book Festival

2023-04-21 01:06:56

This is the Parisian meeting place for lovers of reading and fans of authors. The Paris Book Festival opens its doors this Friday and until Sunday evening at the ephemeral Grand Palais in Paris. A festival that wants to be international. The guest country this year is Italy.

RFI: You are the artistic director of the Festival du livre de Paris, the new name of the Salon du livre. If we have to sum up this festival in a few words, what would we say?

Marie-Madeleine Rigopoulos : Looks like there will be 1 100 authors in dedications, nearly 350 authors in programming, namely, debates, readings, meetings of all kinds… Workshops as well. And then, we hope for 100,000 visitors.

You have set yourself a challenge: the promotion of literature among young people. We realize that one in five young people does not read. What can be done to attract more young people to reading?

I think we have to find a way to convey the message that the book is not a boring object. It’s a vehicle in which you can find all these passions, whether it’s sport, whether it’s knitting, whether it’s literature, whether it’s science. And that can also, at some point, become literature. The important thing is to bring young people into bookstores and bring them to meetings. We will also offer discovery workshops on book trades. What is the profession of editor, illustrator. We are going to organize a meeting with Philippe Cardona, who will come to draw live and share his passion and his vocation with young people. We have to look for crossroads and make young people want to take an interest, and to say to themselves ” Ah, it might be worth going through the door of a bookstore ».

As you said, the guest country this year is Italy. French and French-speaking readers know the big names in Italian literature that have been translated into French: Erri de Luca, Alessandro Baricco… How many Italian authors are coming? Is there vitality in Italian literature today?

About fifty Italian authors are invited. There is a real vitality in Italian literature. The relationship to culture, the relationship to tradition, the relationship to roots and very rooted in the countries of the South. We talk about universal subjects while remaining very rooted in our region.

There is also a more recent phenomenon in Italian literature, perhaps more striking than in France: it is this ability to talk about the foreigner. Italy has long been a land of emigration, it has become a land of immigration. Many authors put into words these Eritreans, these Sudanese who arrive in Italy. Are the Italians more sensitive to this migration issue than the French?

I think they are on the front line. They have the sea at their feet and the borders just in front. So they are confronted, like the Greeks elsewhere, with arrivals in front of which one cannot look away, it is impossible. The writer is no exception and inevitably, he has things to tell since he is impacted.

The Paris Book Festival is also a fair open to French-speaking writers, particularly African ones. This year, you have programmed a few authors.

There are always African authors in French literature and they are necessarily present in the literary landscape. And therefore in the proposal of the Paris Book Fair. I almost want to tell you that I don’t even ask myself the question in those terms anymore. I pose it in terms of literature. For me, whether it comes from the African continent, the United States, or Haiti, it is the language that prevails. It is the richness of the language. This is what this literature will bring to what is very grandiloquently called French literature. We have seen thanks to people like Alain Mabanckou or Dany Laferrière (who will also be present at the Festival), we have seen through these personalities from the literary world that the language is being transformed, becoming poetic. They do it wonderfully well. And thanks to them, the French language is enriched each year through the various productions of the authors who are called francophones.