The 38th Salone Internazionale del Libro opens in Turin on Thursday with Zadie Smith delivering the inaugural lecture and Alessandro Baricco staging a night of words and music. The programme spans Greek crime fiction to football legend Roberto Baggio. The whole event is around the theme of children as the world’s last hope.
This year’s Turin Book Fair — running from Thursday 14 to Monday 18 May at the Lingotto Fiere — takes its central idea from Elsa Morante’s 1968 collection Il mondo salvato dai ragazzini (The World Saved by Kids), a provocative and visionary work that found salvation not in institutions or ideologies but in the irreverent energy of the young.
Journalist and author Annalena Benini is directing the event for the third consecutive year. Her mandate has been renewed through 2029 following last year’s record attendance of 231,000 visitors.
British author Zadie Smith opens the fair
The honorary role of delivering the inaugural lecture falls to Zadie Smith, the 50-year-old Anglo-Caribbean novelist whose work — White Teeth, On Beauty, Swing Time, NW, The Fraud — has made her one of the defining literary voices of her generation. Her lecture, titled “Everything was extreme. And it’s still like that. A reflection on adolescence” is drawn from her latest essay collection Dead and Alive, whose Italian edition, Vivi e morti (Sur), is being published to coincide with her appearance at the fair.
The previous evening, Tuesday 13 May at 8:30pm, the Rai Auditorium in Turin will host the opening night show, “The Childhood of the World. Innocence, Humanity, Resistance,” inspired by Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, with Vinicio Capossela and Pietro Del Soldà.
The International Stars
David Grossman, the Israeli novelist and peace advocate will be one of the biggest draws of the five days. Mondadori has dedicated a two-volume Meridiano to his work — one of Italian publishing’s most prestigious editorial honours — in a project curated by Vlodek Goldkorn.
László Krasznahorkai, the Hungarian writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2025, will receive the Mondello Foreign Author Award at the fair. Emmanuel Carrère arrives with Kolkhoz (Adelphi), an account of his family history and his mother’s death that sold 12,000 copies in its first week in Italy. Kiran Desai, returning with her first novel in twenty years, brings The Solitude of Sonia and Sunny (Adelphi), the story of two young Indians living in New York. Lea Ypi, writer and philosopher, presents her new novel Dignity through Feltrinelli, interweaving family history and twentieth-century Europe.
Greece is this year’s guest of honour, and Greek crime writer Petros Markaris will appear with Growth That Kills (La nave di Teseo). American Senator Bernie Sanders arrives with Against the Oligarchy (Chiarelettere), and Algerian writer Boualem Sansal — imprisoned in his home country — will appear at the Circolo dei Lettori’s Francesissimo Festival.
Italian Voices
The Italian contingent is formidable. Roberto Baggio, one of the greatest footballers in Italian history, will make an anticipated appearance with his book Light in the Darkness (Rizzoli). Rapper and musician Jovanotti will take the stage twice — for Poesie da Viaggio (Crocetti) and for Niccolò Ammaniti’s Il custode (Einaudi).
Roberto Saviano, Alberto Angela, Dacia Maraini, Alessandro Barbero, Massimo Recalcati and Zerocalcare are among the dozens of prominent Italian names confirmed.
Anniversaries and Awards
The fair will mark a cluster of significant anniversaries: the 80th anniversary of the Italian Republic, the 800th anniversary of the birth of Saint Francis of Assisi, the 200th anniversary of Carlo Collodi’s birth, 50th anniversary of Agatha Christie’s death, and the 100th anniversary of the Strega Prize’s founding, among others. The winner of the European Strega Prize and the five finalists for the Strega Poetry Prize will also be announced during the five days.
As has become tradition, the fair will hand a curatorial role to five young people aged 19 to 25, whose perspectives on this edition’s central theme will shape four dedicated meetings — a fitting gesture for an edition that stakes its entire vision on the capacity of youth to see what the rest of us have stopped noticing.
