Co-Branding Dutch literature

The Frankfurt Book Fair is the publishing world’s largest, most important trade fair. It attracts thousands of book professionals from around the world and hundreds of international press. A role of special prominence in this rarefied transnational space goes to the guest of honour, which ‘sets the tone’ for the year’s fair and occupies a 2300-square-metre pavilion designed to be its ‘beating heart’. Walking the halls of the fair, one hears all different languages. But English is the lingua franca of the global publishing industry — and that shows clearly in the branding materials we analyse here.

Mounting a successful bid for the guest of honour platform nowadays is a competitive, long, and expensive affair that starts years or even decades before opening day. For Flanders and the Netherlands, the journey to becoming the 2016 guests of honour began as soon as their first joint showing at Frankfurt in 1993 ended. Helped along by some 130 book translations into German published in the lead-up to and aftermath of the fair, the 1993 Schwerpunkt unleashed a ‘Dutch wave’ across the German-speaking world, which would flow over into other language markets as well.

Since 1993, the number of translated Dutch and Flemish authors has substantially increased, as has the number of languages into which their work is translated. The event is widely seen as a breakthrough moment for Dutch literature in the world – a literature that, up to that point, had remained largely undiscovered beyond its borders despite a rich tradition at home. It also played a key role in the elevation of several Dutch and Flemish writers to international stature, of which Cees Nooteboom is probably the most renowned (despite his initially tepid reception at home).

On an institutional level, the experience of jointly organising the 1993 fair helped to solidify the strategic partnership between Flanders and the Netherlands in the area of the international promotion of Dutch literature, which today is continued by the Dutch Foundation for Literature and Literature Flanders, the two government organisations that promote literature produced by Dutch and Flemish authors. The groundwork for this partnership was laid in 1980 with the founding – in the midst of the Belgian federalisation process – of the Dutch Language Union (Nederlandse Taalunie), a treaty-based, intergovernmental organisation representing the Netherlands and the Flemish Community with a mandate to jointly promote the Dutch language and its literature in Dutch-speaking areas and abroad.