23rd BOOK FAIR(Y) IN ISTRIA
Pula Festival of Books and Authors

Theme: Intimacies

1st – 10th December 2017
House of Croatian Defenders

Vanja Kulaš, a journalist for the specialist web news portal Moderna vremena/Modern Times, recalled a part of the phone call of her unknown fellow traveler on the way from Pula to Zagreb: "We didn't have that much time, so we attended only ten-ish book presentations, which is, nonetheless, a great experience for somebody who loves books…“
That "ten-ish book presentations“ amounted only to 10 percent of the total number of the Fair programs. The publishers were numbered in the hundreds, the displayed titles in the tens of thousands, and the number of visitors exceeded 60,000.

Nataša Medved, the selector for the program À propos, which attracted the wide attention of the audience and media, pointed to the complexity of the topics, tendencies, and influences that form the landscape of contemporary French and Francophone literature, with a special focus on the African literary production, by choosing five young authors of divergent styles and backgrounds. Kaouther Adimi, Sylvain Prudhomme, Maryam Madjidi, Adrien Bosco, and especially Armand Patrick Gbaka-Brédé, known by the pseudonym of Gauz, talked about the clash between Africa and France, social inequalities, racism, and Western Europe.

The Book Fair(y) in Istria – Pula Festival of Books and Authors was proclaimed open, in one of the last of his public appearances, by the late Igor Mandić, a Croatian writer, critic, newspaper commentator, hedonist and erudite.