The Frankfurt Book Fair is over. Five days full of meetings, face to face exchanges, new contacts and several deals! Pontas' success this year has been the sale of translation rights to nine languages of The Violin of Auschwitz, by Catalan author Maria Àngels Anglada (1930-1999): Spanish (Destino), German (Luchterhand-Random House), Italian (Rizzoli), Dutch (De Geus), Greek (Konidaris), French (Stock), Portuguese-Portugal (Sextante), Portuguese-Brasil (Globo) and Polish (finishing negotiations right now...). We´ve been told to get ready to receive more offers within the next days!! It is an honour to be able to spread this wonderful and powerful novel all over!! Frankfurt is also a place where business and friendship tend to mix, where books and authors become the subject of all conversations, from the early morning until late at night. The echo of the conversations mixing languages and accents is still in my mind: a long meeting with Suzanne Brandreth from Canadian The Cooke Agency (we are happy succeeding to sell translation rights in many territories of their great authors!); a casual open air meeting with Lucien Leitess from Unionsverlag (Switzerland) and Eric Visser and Ilonka Reintjens from De Geus (Netherlands); sharing table with Teresa Cremisi and Patrice Hoffmann from Flammarion (France) at the Fischer Verlag dinner; celebrating the Man Booker Prize with Marc Parent, the winner's French publisher at Buchet Chastel and Gita Wolf and Sirish Rao from Tara Publishing (India); the magic story of Marc de Gouvenain from Actes Sud (France) and how he found and translated from Swedish the Millenium trilogy by Stieg Larsson and more than two million copies have been sold so far in France...
October 20th, 2008