Spanish Books on Show in Guadalajara

At FIL, the rivalry between Planeta and Penguin Random House Groupo Editorial, the two dominant publishers in the Spanish-language market, was on full display

The largest book fair in the Western Hemisphere doesn’t happen in New York or even in Los Angeles but in a Mexican city known as the birthplace of tequila and mariachi and for being home to a thriving high-tech community.

The Guadalajara International Book Fair – known by its Spanish acronym as FIL – is the second largest book fair in the entire world next to Frankfurt. After Spain and Argentina, Mexico is also the third largest Spanish book market in the world and the largest by population. As Edward Nawotka, International Editor for Publishers Weekly reported recently, the two largest publishers of Spanish-language books sparred for dominance at the 2019 FIL.

“At FIL, the rivalry between Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial was on full display,” he tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally.

On the show floor, Planeta had hung a giant floor-to-ceiling advertisement for Javier Cercas’s novel Terra Alta and Manuel Vilas’s Alegría, the winner and runner-up, respectively, of the 2019 Planeta Book Prize. The prize, which is given for not-yet-published Spanish-language manuscripts, comes with a cash award of €601,000 for first place and €150,250 for the runner-up, making it the second-biggest literary award in the world after the Nobel.

“Cercas and Vilas were both previously committed to be published by PRHGE, where they were among the house’s bestselling authors, but after the award, the authors both announced that the prize-winning books would be published by Planeta,” Nawotka says. “News quickly circulated—and was confirmed by a source close to the authors—that each was given a generous signing bonus, said to be €400,000 for Cercas and €150,000 for Vilas.”