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Guadalajara Book Fair


Tuesday 3 December 2019

The Feria International del Libro de Guadalajara (Guadalajara Book Fair)  is the second largest bookfair in the world and has been running for 33 years.  It is being held in the World Expo Centre in Guadalajara from the 1-9 December and I am lucky enough to be attending this year with my host colleague Kathy and several of her colleagues who are here to meet Mexican publishers and work with their colleagues based in Mexico on a project.

Our travel to Guadalajara took most of Sunday, one of the busiest days at US airports due to it being the Sunday of Thanksgiving when many people are travelling home.  Some poor people were stuck in the Phoenix airport due to snow storms in the East. We were not affected by that, but we did have to change planes before we finally set off from Phoenix.

When we arrived in Guadalajara we walked down to the venue and got our bearings with one of Kathy’s former doctoral students showing us the way. And one of the first booths I saw was of New Zealand publishers! There I saw one of my colleague and friend’s newly published books Whakarongo ki ō Tūpuna- Listen to your ancestors (by Darryn Joseph, Oratia, 2019), and it was almost like bumping into Darryn himself! If you haven’t already seen this, it is a beautifully written and illustrated bilingual picturebook. For a review, look here.
Our first full day was Monday, and what a feast It was. I spent most of the day in the Mexican National section, featuring Mexican publishers and many university presses. It was really impressive. There were two aisles dedicated to children’s literature, and even though I can’t read Spanish very well, the picturebooks won the day, and I purchased some wordless books and bilingual books to bring back to my library. One bilingual book I purchased was Zig Zag, de la A a la Z- from A to Z (Written by Alonzo Nunez & Rochelle Newman, Illustrated by Pablo Zweig, 2018) which is an inventive bilingual book using a format I hadn’t seen before. The first half of the book gives words for the letters A to Z, alternating  Spanish and English, so the letter A  gives words in Spanish, and B gives different words in English. Then half way through the book, there is a page saying ‘Second part: English starts! Val al reves: Primero Ingles’, and the rest of the book repeats the alphabet, but this time English words are given for A and Spanish words for B (not the same as those given in the first half of the book). I’ll be using this when I discuss bilingual picturebook formats with my children’s literature
The wordless book is entitled Migrando (by Mariana Chiesa Mateos, 2010) is formatted in tête-bêche format, with two stories meeting in the middle of two migrants.  I wanted to have this book for the wordless format which fits with the 2019 WaiRU picturebook seminar. I also like the idea of two perspectives of a similar journey given within the same book.
There are many more books to see tomorrow!

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