Bologna kids' fair preview

A children’s book fair in Bologna is about to double as an export market, a talent scout, and an art show all at once. From April 13 to April 16, the 63rd Bologna Children’s Book Fair will run alongside Bologna Book Plus and the Bologna Licensing Trade Fair at the Bologna Exhibition Centre in Italy. (bolognachildrensbookfair.com) This is not a public-facing book festival in the usual sense. Publishers, agents, illustrators, printers, and rights sellers use Bologna to buy and sell the permission to publish books in other countries, which is why trade coverage treats the fair like a global marketplace for children’s stories. (publishersweekly.com) The scale is why previews get so much attention before the doors even open. Publishers Weekly says the 2026 fair is expected to bring together roughly 1,500 exhibitors from 90 countries, which turns one week in Bologna into a place where a picture book can go from local title to international property. (publishersweekly.com) One of this year’s draws is an exhibition that usually lives in New York. Publishing Perspectives reports that Bologna will show, for the first time outside the United States, a selection of gold and silver medal winners from the “Books” section of the Society of Illustrators’ Annual Illustrators Competition, covering 2022 through 2026. (publishingperspectives.com) That matters inside publishing because Bologna has spent decades turning illustration into a hiring floor. Its own Illustrators Exhibition started in 1967, and the fair says the show is built to spot new artists and put their work directly in front of publishers looking for the next book, cover, or series style. (bolognachildrensbookfair.com) The 2026 edition shows how crowded that pipeline has become. In January, fair organizers said the new Illustrators Exhibition selections were chosen from about 20,790 submissions by 4,158 illustrators across 94 countries and regions, with 75 winning illustration sets making the final exhibition. (publishingperspectives.com) The fair is also using its network to build books in places that have been underrepresented in global children’s publishing. A project called Bookstorm grew out of a partnership with Bologna and is trying to increase the number of children’s books that show Nigerian kids their own homes, languages, families, and routines instead of imported defaults. (publishingperspectives.com) Bookstorm is tied to Nigerian writer and publisher Lola Shoneyin, who also founded the Book Buzz Foundation and the Aké Arts and Book Festival. The project’s own site says Bologna Children’s Book Fair and Mimaster Illustrazione Milan helped run a 10-week illustration course for 16 Nigerian artists. (publishingperspectives.com) (bookstorm.ng) The training was not just classroom theory. The Book Buzz Foundation says the artists built portfolios by illustrating a story called *Zizah is Different*, a book about a neurodivergent Nigerian boy and his family, which gave the course a finished-book target instead of generic practice pages. (bookbuzzfoundation.org) So the Bologna preview is really two stories about the same machine. One side brings medal-winning illustration from New York into Italy’s biggest children’s rights market, and the other side uses that same market to help create new children’s books in Nigeria that look and sound like the children reading them. (publishingperspectives.com 1) (publishingperspectives.com 2)