The 30th edition of the New Delhi World Book Fair (NDWBF), which was scheduled to be held in Pragati Maidan from January 8 to 16, has been postponed in view of the latest DDMA guidelines imposed following the increase in Covid cases induced by the young. -dissemination of the Omicron variant, organizers said in a statement.
New dates for NDWBF, held online last year due to the Covid pandemic, will be announced separately, he said.
First held in 1972, the NDWBF planned to celebrate its Golden Jubilee with a photo exhibition this year.
Given the latest DDMA guidelines and requests from various stakeholders, NDWBF 2022 has been postponed. The new dates will be announced separately, ” the National Book Trust (NBT), the event’s organizer, said in the statement.
To contain the spread of Covid, the Delhi Disaster Management Authority (DDMA) decided on Tuesday to impose a weekend curfew in the city. The curfew will be in effect between 10 p.m. on Friday and 5 a.m. on Monday.
Big publishing houses like Penguin Random House India (PRHI) and Bloomsbury, which were not attending the next book fair anyway, welcomed the decision of the organizers to postpone the book fair in the current scenario.
While Krishna Naroor, Vice President (Sales and Marketing), Bloomsbury India, said they can foresee the postponement decision amid the current Covid situation; Nandan Jha, Senior Vice President (Sales and Products), PRHI praised NBT’s “timely and prudent” decision to postpone the event, keeping current developments in mind.
“We had discussed in detail when the trade show participation announcement came out last year and made the conscious decision not to participate as we did not know how things were going to play out in this Covid situation,” said Naroor at PTI.
” The NDWF is a great opportunity for publishers to showcase their publications, and it’s a good time to engage with clients in general … so yes if it’s happening three or four months down the road and we see a sense of normalcy coming back, we too could participate, ” he added.
That said, the announcement of the postponement of the fair came as a “bit of a disappointment” for several small publishing houses, like Garuda Prakashan, which had a slew of book launches and more than half a dozen. author events planned for the fair.
We were a bit disappointed with the postponement of the book fair, as things were looking better after a hiatus of over a year. We are always passionate about such physical events and we had aligned several events with our authors during this show. However, we have to take it in our wake, because ultimately the health of our readers and everyone involved in the organization of the fair is more important. We hope that when things get back to normal we will come back big, ”said Ankur Pathak, Director and COO of Garuda Prakashan.
The theme of this year’s festival was “Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav”, commemorating 75 years of Indian independence. Numerous literary and cultural programs, including a special children’s corner, a yuva corner, seminars, debates, workshops, have been organized with France as the guest country.
(This story was not edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)