The Bologna Children’s Book Fair has, over decades, helped construct a specific
image of illustration as a discipline: international, curated, and closely tied to the picturebook as both medium and art form. Founded in 1964 as a professional event for children’s publishing, it quickly became a global meeting point where text and image were understood as inseparable parts of storytelling. With the introduction of the Illustrators Exhibition in 1967, illustration was established as a discrete, visible field — subject to selection, comparison, and judgment (International Publishing Organisation 2016). Within this framework, illustration appears as an authored, concept-driven practice rather than a purely functional craft. This has clear strengths: it legitimises illustration as a cultural discipline, offers visibility to emerging artists, and creates a shared international discourse. At the same time, this image is not neutral. Because works are selected for exhibition and must communicate effectively within that format, clarity, conceptual immediacy, and visual distinctiveness are privileged. Over time, this produces a recognisable “global style” and risks marginalising slower, more text-dependent, or structurally complex practices.

This was my first time at Bologna and it really emphasised to me the importance and significance of illustration practice to this publishing sector. It's a visual spectacle — all the stands and vibrant books — you get a sense of the all the overwhelming range of styles and the diverse audiences and markets this beloved format orbits around. The emphasis is clearly on supporting an industrial process, with less emphasis on emerging artist support — and I get that, money talks — but I was kind of expecting more of support network, i.e., attention paid to the swathes of emerging illustrators who attend and will sustain this outfit in future years.

Being a fully international arena, it’s probably not realistic to reduce Bologna’s
representation of the illustration field to any overarching summary. As well as being international in the publishing sense, the fair has, over the years increasingly showcased emerging, unpublished illustrators through the various competitions and exhibitions that are run annually. Having served on juries for these several times, I have seen the vast range of submissions for these first hand. And of course, as with Edinburgh Festival, there are all sorts of ‘fringe’ exhibitions running in the city. The publishers at the fair vary enormously in their presentation of illustration, from highly esoteric, ‘artistic’ independents to massive conglomerates with global ‘brand’ illustration. I would see this as a strength.

I think it projects an image of illustration as an artistic discipline with a significant and long-standing cultural and economic weight, capable of sustaining a global industry. Personally, I am quite biased as I have a strong personal connection to Bologna and the fair. I also grew up reading Gianni Rodari (illustrated by Bruno Munari) and Carlo Collodi (illustrated by Maraja) in translation, together with Rudyard Kipling, Astrid Lindgren and world fairy tales. As someone who acquired Italian citizenship, I am very attuned to the attitude towards culture, aesthetic education and the view of the child in the region (after all Reggio Emilia is just a stone's throw away). As Paola Vassalli – a scientific consultant of the fair for many years – observed, the establishment of the fair in 1964 happened at the same time as the creation by Jella Lepman of The International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) – a non-profit organization focusing on spreading an intercultural debate on children and books around the world. (“Sessant’anni della Mostra degli Illustratori” in Illustrators Annual 2026, p.4)

In my opinion, there are three intersecting areas which make the fair valuable for those with an interest in illustrated children's books: its role as an international hub, which attracts professionals and cultural institutions from all over the world, a space in which history and future co-exist, and lastly, but perhaps most importantly, a space where the contradictory juxtaposition of industry and art/culture at the service of the child could materialise.

The pitfalls of such a romantic view could be that books that get celebrated and win awards are viewed as the only worthy of production, at the expense of the quieter ones, that could still be a child's favourite. We could all be blinded by a beautiful design or clever concept, and as illustrators and authors, we should attempt to avoid having illustration as our only inspiration and reference point.

Seen from the ground, however, this system also reveals another layer—one where illustration increasingly becomes an exposure economy. I first visited the fair in 1991 and have returned several times, most recently in 2026. One constant is the spectacle of access: long queues of illustrators waiting to show portfolios to a handful of agents or publishers. These lines are not incidental—they are emblematic. The same applies to the Illustrators Wall, where artists pin up postcards in the hope of being noticed. That it is colloquially known as the Wall of Tears is telling. What is framed as openness—visibility for all—simultaneously stages competition and scarcity. The fair produces not only images, but desire: the desire to be selected, to be seen, to enter the field.

This dynamic is underscored by spaces such as the Illustrators Survival Corner, offering advice, portfolio reviews, and coping strategies. No equivalent “survival” infrastructure exists for publishers, agents, or rights managers. The asymmetry is striking. It reveals a structural precarity within the field: illustrators are positioned as those who must adapt, endure, and compete within a system that depends on their continual visibility. The language of “survival” exposes something fundamental. Sometimes imbalance is so explicit that it becomes invisible.

As I said, this was my first emergence in the Bologna soup. What I was very happy to see and hear was talks — and conversations on the stands — that embraced the poetics of the form and a call to not talk down to a younger audience, but rather sprinkle more ambiguity within the pages. Claudia Rueda’s address was particularly inspiring in this regard.

I’ve been attending for over twenty years or so, and I would say that the ‘cultural’
aspect of illustration has been increasingly recognised and celebrated alongside the purely commercial, the latter being of course the main purpose of the fair – the buying and selling of international co-editions between publishers. Also noticeable is the increased presence of illustration schools and courses, university-based and private, since Cambridge School of Art first took a small stand to showcase student work in 2010. Perhaps the most significant change is the much-increased internationalisation of illustration. Twenty years ago, it was rare to see overseas artists published in English language picturebooks. Artists from France, Italy and the Far East for example were often seen as stylistically ‘too sophisticated’ for the UK and US market but at last we are able to see the books of e.g. Beatrice Alemagna, Aditi Anand, Victoria Semykina in our shops and with so many Illustration students from the Far East studying in the UK and US, an increasing number are finding English Language publishers.
The Illustration Survival Corner at the fair needs a mention too, putting on workshops and discussions with illustrators and academics around the world exploring the practice and history of our discipline.

In the last ten to fifteen years, there has been a noticeable shift towards events aimed at illustrators. Back in the day, as the numbers of bidding illustrators were steadily increasing, it was best to go under cover past the spaces around the exhibition and the Illustrators cafe, given that the halls were territory reserved for rights negotiations. Since the establishment of two separate parallel events dedicated exclusively to licensing and media, in more recent years halls host big and welcoming spaces dedicated to comics, illustration, writers and translators, as well as several exhibitions of unpublished books and illustrations. The feeling is that the bookfair celebrates illustration and caters for bidding illustrators more than ever, offering masterclasses, workshops and portfolio reviews. One novelty I noticed this year was publishers giving organised tours for groups of librarians, so maybe the book world, and as a consequence the fair, is expanding in all directions. 

In terms of what could be of interest to a researcher in children’s books, there is a growing number of events outside the fair involving the whole city in the week of the fair and beyond, such as exhibitions, conferences and presentations. This year I had the chance to attend a seminar on the life and work of Mitsumasa Anno, and browse his books held by the Passerini collection in Parma. Other personal highlights for me were the personal exhibitions of Eva Lundström and Victoria Semykina. There was also a touching performance inspired by the What is a Child? (2008) picturebook by Beatrice Alemagna which had been spontaneously brought up in anti-war protests all over Italy following a TV talk show in which the phrase “Define a child” was used by a speaker.

The stands of the fair offer a chance to browse artist books by Bruno Munari and Katsumi Komagata, or see newly translated classics by Tana Hoban and Helen Oxenbury next to the latest and forthcoming titles. These translations and new editions have the potential to acquire new meanings in different cultural contexts and can shift the whole perspective of what constitutes a recent title.

The Illustrators exhibition could also be viewed as a trend-setting or trend-showcasing element of the fair. For example, the presence of diverse analogue materials could be seen as a response to AI-generated imagery. The selection of course also reflects the tastes of the jury. This year there were illustrations featuring embroidery and, in the case of Yuxuan Zhou’s work, something I had not seen before – sand on PVC. I was not very impressed by the small scale originals, but find the scaled up reproductions very beautiful.

In recent years, Bologna has expanded globally, drawing thousands of submissions from across continents and reflecting a wider range of visual traditions. At the same time, it has shifted from a purely commercial marketplace to a broader cultural platform—hosting exhibitions, reviews, and discussions that frame illustration as a site of discourse. It now operates as a node of attention and validation. Yet this expansion intensifies the same dynamics: more participants, but still limited visibility; more diversity but always filtered.

These conditions are closely tied to shifts in the picturebook itself. The traditional
model—linear, child-focused, text-image balanced—has loosened. Contemporary works emphasise atmosphere, fragmentation, and visual narrative, sometimes without text, and increasingly address mixed audiences. The book becomes an object with its own logic. But even these developments circulate within Bologna’s structures of recognition.

The paradox remains: Bologna elevates illustration while exposing it to competition and consumption. It creates opportunity, but also dependency. It defines excellence but narrows it. What appears as celebration is also a system of sorting—between those who are seen, and those who remain pinned to the wall.

As I said, this was my first emergence in the Bologna soup. What I was very happy to see and hear was talks — and conversations on the stands — that embraced the poetics of the form and a call to not talk down to a younger audience, but rather sprinkle more ambiguity within the pages. Claudia Rueda’s address was particularly inspiring in this regard.

It’s tricky to separate the cart from the horse on this one. The picturebook has
evolved so much as an authorial artform in recent years, with the vast majority now created by the single artist-picturebook-maker/ ‘singer-songwriter’ and Bologna has perhaps been both a shaper and a reflector. Regular appearances of leading practitioners such as Alemagna and Sydney Smith have impacted and at Bologna this year the announcements of China’s Cai Gao as winner of the Hans Christian Andersen Award and of Klassen taking the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award will surely further lift the profile and expand the understanding of the picturebook-maker’s art, through Cai Gao’s exquisite classical painting and Klassen’s contrasting, but equally brilliant minimalism.

I might have missed it due to my inability to get a grasp of all that is being published lately. Thankfully, there is still a lot of diversity, and we have to hope that there will never be just one idea and definition of the medium, as there is also never going to be one type of reader.  

Telling stories that matter to the children of today and hoping that these stories will matter also to the children of tomorrow is what drives many illustrators, and the study of the past could be as helpful to them as monitoring the latest developments. 

If we look at the BRAW Bologna Ragazzi Awards archive, the 2007 40th edition winner was Stian Hole's Garmann's Summer (2006), translated in English language in 2024. Given that Norway was the guest of honour in 2026, Hole's work was exhibited in town and at the fair. In the same edition of the award, a dedicated special mention was given to Shaun Tan for The Arrival, which defied categorizing and A Lion in Paris by Beatrice Alemagna was also amongst the titles with mentions, both have become classics now. The winning book in the New Horizons award in 2007, El libro negro de los colores by Menena Cottin and Rosana Faria instead had a hard time after the initial enthusiastic reception, once issues with its accessibility arose due the Braille letters not being printed at an optimal depth. 

The Bologna Ragazzi award added a Toddler section recently and every year a Special award is also given to a chosen category: Fables and Fairy Tales for 2026, Sustainability for 2025 and so on, inviting publishers to send titles published in the past seven years.