Europe’s vast range of literary events includes some of the oldest and most venerated in the world. Use the search menu below to find events across the continent.
Every year in May, the Étonnants Voyageurs festival is attended by approx. 250 authors from around the world and nearly 60,000 visitors, who come to Saint-Malo to attend the 3-day festival. Established in 1990 Étonnants Voyageurs unites a rich program consisting of meetings, debates, literary cafés, film screenings and exhibitions. Several prizes are awarded during the festival.
Since 2005, Lyon has hosted the Quai du Polar festival dedicated to fans of thriller, detective novels and crime in April. Long considered a minor genre, the detective novel is now one of the most popular literature genres in France. Authors from all over the world are presenting their works and signing autographs. Furthermore, there are specialists holding conferences, directors showing their films, games and entertainment for the whole family, concerts, theaters, and many other activities linked to the genre.
For 3 days nearly 350 authors and publishing houses of all sizes come to meet a large audience at the Paris Book Festival. It is annually held in April at the Grand Palais Éphémère where the first Edition of the Paris Book Fair took place around 40 years ago. The festival promotes the diversity of French publishing and the creativity of French authors through workshops for families, artistic performances, concerts and meeting between authors and readers.
The Children’s Book Fair in Montreuil is a major literary festival in multiple forms with over 250 invited authors, a European exhibition of children’s illustrations, around 450 exhibitors, small and large publishing houses, press publishers, associations, and organizations for reading. The program of the fair specializes in Children’s Books. The visitors can discover albums, novels, comics, documentaries, manga, press magazines and more in a period between November and December.
The festival for comics has been held annually in Angoulême since 1974 and is considered the most important comic festival in Europe. Around 200,000 visitors attend the festival every year in January for four days in January. Among others, well-known comic artists are invited to the festival. Since it takes place all over the town, and is celebrated in many different areas, Angoulême became France’s “City of Comics”.
