SIBF 2025 18-22 June, 2025 l COEX Halls A & B1
To promote Korea’s publishing culture to the world, the SIBF strives to get Korea invited as a guest of honor at international book fairs.
Such programs not only feature publishing and copyright exchanges but also demonstrate a nation's economic, political, diplomatic, and cultural competence.
Publishers that produce books, writers who create content, artists, scholars, and cultural and diplomatic institutions all work together
to promote Korea’s books and culture and arts. During this process, Korea and a book fair's host country conduct material and immaterial exchanges,
sharing ideas as well as sentiments.
Theme | XYZ |
---|---|
Period | 26 - 31 January, 2021 |
Venue | Online |
Sponsor | Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, Publication Industry Promotion Agency of Korea |
Cooperation | Literature Translation Institute of Korea, Publication Industry Promotion Agency of Korea |
Readers in Korea and Taiwan live contemporaneous lives. They walk down the streets of Seoul and Taipei in similar outfits and listen to the same music. Lounging in cafes, they sip on coffee while reading the same books. Notwithstanding the two and a half hours needed to traverse the distance between us, our lives flow concurrently. Having endured the similar adversities of colonialism, division, and authoritarianism, even our concerns overlap. There are generations. The generation that painstakingly achieved economic development has waned; slower economic development and low growth riddle our youth with new worries, pushing their dreams of a peaceful, normal life out of reach. There is gender. As stereotypical, Confucianist gender roles and relations are rapidly dismantled, we now find the need to reimagine gender altogether.
Generation X, Y, Z, and millennial Koreans now seek out Taiwan, armed with stories created by nurturing different thoughts in the same spatiotemporal setting. As visitors in Taiwan, which was the first country in the world to allow same-sex marriage and is currently helmed by exemplary female leadership in the COVID-19 era, we look forward to discussing Korea’s effort made thus far to reimagine gender beyond just male and female. It goes without saying that we are not the same. But Korea and Taiwan have honored their differences while achieving mutual growth. By enjoying the same things as different people, we build a foundation for friendship. This friendship stayed foremost in our minds as we prepared our guest of honor program for the Taipei International Book Exhibition. We hope to deepen our friendship while sharing our concerns through books.
- Speaker: Cheon Gwan-yul(SisaIN reporter), Son Hee-jeong(Culture critic), Park Ji-hyung(Prof. of Ewha Womans Univ.)
- Speaker: Kim Jeonyeon(Webtoon author), Seo Eun-young(Comics critic)
- Speaker: Park Hye-jin(Editor, Literary critic), Gwon Kim Hyeon-young(Women’s studies scholar)