25th BOOK FAIR(Y) IN ISTRIA
Pula Festival of Books and Authors

Theme: Cities in Progress

5th – 15th December 2019
House of Croatian Defenders

In the late summer of 1995, Croatia was still a country at war. The fact that the war will soon come to an end could mean a lot of things, none of them being perfect timing to plan the Pula Festival of Books and Authors. Still, that festival, which will become the Fair, and then Fair(y), did happen. The only less probable thing at the time would be to expect that its 25th edition will happen. Well, it did, indeed, happen, and only its founder – late Boško Obradović – could have told us, if there was such a possibility, how he imagined the future of the Fair.

A quarter of a century of the Pula Festival of Books and Authors was marked by breaking records in the number of programs, participants, publishers, book titles, and visitors.
That year of 2019 and that 25th anniversary showed how the Book Fair(y) grew and proved right the decision to imagine and produce it in an ambitious manner, to create it in a way that prevents it from becoming a provincial pillar where the foreign authors feel like they are granting mercy to the local ones through their sole presence, yet allows it to remain unpretentious, rendering the debutants equal to the authors that gained recognition while those new authors learned the alphabet, while constantly resonating with the city where it occurs.

The jubilee Fair was officially proclaimed open by one of the most prominent Pula authors, Serbian writer Dragan Velikić, whereas the director of the Fair, Magdalena Vodopija, reminisced about Albert Goldstein and Dušan Karpatsky, who had a significant role in the creation and growth of the Fair, and the publishers who "stayed side by side with the Fair through all the financial crisis caused by the transition, and all of its ups and downs“.

What she could not have known at the time is that her announcement of the 26th Fair – imagined to be just like the first one, enlivened with the new formats, concepts, and ideas – would get a whole new meaning just a few months after and that the realization of wishes can sometimes be much worse than their non-fulfillment.

Not long after the closing of the Book Fair(y) in Istria – Pula Festival of Books and Authors the same happened to the world - the whole world.