Bookstore Lello invested more than three million euros in the Babell festival

“ O what's going to happen at Babell is to put the book and the reading at the center of public life. This is what has moved us for many months, more than a year, when we began to idealize and give birth to Babell”, says Lusa the event commissioner, editor and writer Rui Couceiro.

Asked by Lusa about the event’s budget, he explains that the value invested by Lello “has already exceeded the three million euros”, not counting the coproduction of the House of Porto.

Couceiro connects the event to the 30 years of the distinction of the Historic Center of Porto as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, and expects to see “thousands of people in the streets of books in hand”, after the tickets are, in the background, the purchase of books in the associated bookstores, during the last months.

In addition to the “quality of the poster”, he highlights, it is “the mobilization of the city and of the whole cultural fabric” that distinguishes Babell, by taking people to the bookstores and helping “to the creation or strengthening of cultural audiences”, also in the year in which they mark 25 years of Porto – European Capital of Culture.

The Polish Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel Prize in Literature in 2018, will be on Saturday 27th with Marta Bernardes, in a session scheduled for 6:00 pm in Gomes Teixeira Square, next to the rectory of the University of Porto, which will host much of the sessions.

Tokarczuk is the author of “Viages”, “Driving your plow over the bones of the dead”, “Bizarre Stories” and “Empúsio”, all edited in Portugal by Ferro Horse, among others.

That day, at 8:15 pm, artist Cai Guo-Qiang signs an artistic spectacle in the skies under the Douro River, visible from Ribeira and Cais de Gaia.

“ It's creating an enormous expectation. A spectacle with more than 600 drones and pyrotechnics in the skies of the city, or in a hybrid territory, because it is above the Douro River”, praises the commissioner.

Among the highlights of the program is the Nobel Prize in Literature 2025, László Krasznahorkai, the author of “The Tango of Satan” and “Herscht 07769”, born in Hungary, at a session scheduled for 18:30 on Sunday, June 28, in Gomes Teixeira Square.

The British Salman Rushdie takes the stage of the Porto Coliseum at 9:30 p.m. on a day that still includes a conversation by Julian Barnes, awarded a Booker in 2011 for “The Sense of the End”, and from whom Quetzal recently published “Partida”, which he announced as the final novel.

Before, at 4:00 p.m., Canadian Margaret Atwood, author of “The Dispossessed”, among other works, will be in the ‘Leons’, because it is also known the square in the center of Porto, for a moderate session by Tânia Gaino.

The list of award-winning writers also includes Brazilian Conceição Evaristo, whose latest novel is “Song for Ninar Menino Grande” (2022), Colombian Héctor Abad Faciolince and Spanish Javier Cercas, also the South Korean Byung-Chul Han, who will be in Matosinhos at the inauguration of the Thought Garden, next to the Monastery of Leça do Balio, on 24.

Lusophonia is represented, the organization advances by names such as Lídia Jorge, Gonçalo M. Tavares, Ana Paula Tavares, Valter Hugo Mãe, Milton Hatoum, João de Melo, Dulce Maria Cardoso, Djamilia Pereira de Almeida and Bruno Vieira Amaral, among others, without forgetting Conceição Evaristo.

All sessions, the Commissioner says, are free of theme, not to cause “waste”, to circulate “freely the ideas and opinions” of the authors.

The GNR will join Pedro Abrunhosa and a surprise artist for a concert on Avenida dos Aliados, which will include a new song, created together, in performance scheduled for Thursday, day 25, while Barbara Bandeira and Carminho perform the next day.

Asked about the weight of representation and gender balance in the programming (the invited authors, residents, authors of exhibitions, curators and moderators are more men than women, according to the ‘site’ of the event), as well as about the lack of trans authors, Rui Couceiro clarifies that “the only criterion for an event of this nature is that of literary quality”.

“ We invited the authors who seemed to us the best within those who were available, because we had invited and was not available. It is possible to make this balance, but the only criterion that presided over the invitations we made was the criterion of literary and artistic quality ", says.

In addition to the sessions with writers and concerts, the event co-produced with the House of Porto also includes exhibitions, classes, performances, conferences, colloquies, programming designed for children and families and cinema.