Now in its thirty-seventh edition, the Salone Internazionale del Libro di Torino, or the Turin International Book Fair, continues to be a vital occasion for the literary community, gathering a diverse and lauded array of writers from around the globe to speak about their craft and its reflection of the world. This year, the theme “Le parole tra noi leggere/ Words fall lightly between us” gestured towards the need for literature to create connections and compassions; in the following dispatch, Veronica Gisondi reports on the illuminations to be found in this “between,” capturing the intersections and collisions that marked this year’s Fair.
This year, the Turin International Book Fair gathered a constellation of voices that, like a compass, revealed multiple paths to traverse the conflicts of the present and the complexities that await us, prefiguring a future expectant with the consequences of increasing inequality, oppression, and unbridled political violence. In these crossings, the fair also bridged a distance—the one that separates Europe from the rest of the Mediterranean, its ancient cradle—which has, for too long, appeared bigger than it actually is.
Some of the speakers that enlivened the fair’s thirty-seventh edition—held on May 15 to 19 in Lingotto, a former Fiat car factory—dissected the impact of being subjected to settler-colonial violence and the potential of literature in resistance. A dialogue between the Palestinian short-story writer Ziad Khaddash and Palestinian-Syrian writer and journalist Raed Wahesh took place on the anniversary of the Nakba (a day that signals the start of a long process of occupation and expropriation); in observance, Grazia Dell’Oro, Wahesh’s Italian publisher, remarked that “for us Westerners, anniversaries are often a way to clean our conscience. But we believe that the lively literary life of the Palestinian world needs to be remembered and promoted here at the fair,” and further stressed the risks of “the victimization that comes with an Orientalist gaze.”
For Khaddash, a problem still concerning Palestinian writers is that their “rage” is very far from the “literary dimension,” and thus difficult to reconcile with traditional conceptions of artistic value. If reading was “a response to a massacre that could never be defeated with tears or desperation,” writing has always been “a way to survive that very anger.” Khaddash noted how, post-1948, the Palestinian youth weren’t allowed to write about their fears, their worries, or their unease—but “they didn’t want to abandon resistance.” Instead, they sought to find “a new way to fight the occupation,” aware that one of its aims has always been the elimination of “the freedom they had in their private lives.” For Wahesh, on the other hand, Palestine’s truth is to be found in refugee camps, where “people are the story.” Born in a camp close to Damascus, the author spoke of a Palestine of “exile and survival,” of “camps of displacement, homelessness, humiliation, camps of dignity and honor,” where literature and storytelling are naturally part of people’s lives.
Death, which “dictatorship and colonialism” has transformed into “something brutal,” is a companion, an interlocutor, an end as much as a beginning to Wahesh; in his newly translated poetry collection, Il libro degli assenti [The book of the absent], death remarkably emerges as a positive, central theme. It also appears in another work, Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance, as an origin, albeit of a darker kind. First published in 2014 and longlisted for the International Booker Prize this year, Azem’s novel—which recounts the inexplicable disappearance of all Palestinian Arabs from Israel—could be described as a cautionary tale or a work of speculative fiction, but as the author poignantly remarked in her speech, it is “historical” instead of “prophetic,” echoing the reality of a genocide that has to do with “democracy, rights, and freedom,” and therefore relevant to all. Through her prose, she examines the fragile bonds that tie history, memory, and language, introducing an inquiry akin to that of fellow Palestinian writer Adania Shibli, who attended the fair to present Sensi (published in English as Touch), a novella recently reprinted by La Nave di Teseo. Writing through the sharpness of a young girl’s senses, Shibli transcends borders while preserving the specificity of experience. Another highlight was bestselling Greek author Dimitris Lyacos, who presented the Italian translation of his latest work, Finché la vittima non sarà nostra [Until the victim is ours], drawing a parallel with Wittgenstein’s ladder to situate the text itself as something to be transcended. For both Shibli and Lyacos, pain and violence are distinctly embodied rather than literary.
It must be noted that, alongside the many luminous testimonies mentioned above, the fair made ample room for Zionist stances and genocide deniers, such as Italian-Israeli journalist Fiamma Nirenstein who, with Nicoletta Tiliacos, authored La guerra antisemita contro l’Occidente [The antisemitic war against the West], or Nathan Greppi, author of La cultura dell’odio [Hate culture]. The latter’s participation was contested by a sit-in organized by the committee Turin for Gaza on the festival’s first day, and though police forces were called to respond, such events are part of a legacy of protests at the fair; in 2024, hundreds of people—from student collectives to activist groups to the city’s Arab community—joined a demonstration in solidarity with Palestine, and in 2023, Extinction Rebellion and Non Una Di Meno disrupted a talk by the Italian Minister for the Family, Eugenia Roccella, to oppose her stance on abortion rights.
Despite the ever-present and crude political missteps, Turin’s International Book Fair made some tentative but promising progress to outline an expanded conception of Europe, whose history is rooted in the Mediterranean and indebted to the cultures that have been infusing it with life since ancient times. This broader vision compels us, now more than ever, to awaken to its violence. One of the festival’s merits might have been precisely this: to make us face our political responsibilities, especially towards the stories we too often and too easily “forget,” hoping we won’t be this late again.
Veronica Gisondi is a writer and translator based in Milan. She works across critical theory, poetry, contemporary art and cultural criticism. Her writing has been featured in Rivista Studio, Coeval Magazine, Lampoon Magazine, Conceptual Fine Arts, Jungle Magazine, Droste Effect Magazine, no exits, and SINK, among others. She’s the founder of Incunabula, an independent editorial project for the dissemination of Italian writing in English translation. Its first release, published in April 2025, is Letters to the Blind by Camilla Salvatore. She holds an MA in Culture, Criticism and Curation from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London.
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