New Zealand – Guest of Honour of Frankfurt Book Fair 2012

Enlarge image Witi Ihimaera, Juergen Boos and Tanea Heke (© Photo: courtesy of Alexander Heimann)

A conch shell is blown to call people together. Ancient stories are told. Maori songs lift the visitor’s spirits and exotic dances cast their spell…

The first of these sentences is evocative of the South Pacific rather than South Hesse and the second sounds more like summer than autumn. Even so, the scene depicted above was on view in front of a large crowd in Frankfurt recently. The presentation was meant to give the audience a small taste of what would be on show at next year’s Frankfurt Book Fair – when New Zealand will be the guest of honour at the world’s most renowned book fair.

Enlarge image (© Photo: courtesy of Alexander Heimann)

With the relevant agreements having been signed at the beginning of June 2011 during German Foreign Minister Dr. Guide Westerwelle’s visit to New Zealand, the South Pacific island nation now presented itself officially at this year’s Book Fair. Project Leader Tanea Heke promised “a spiritual and sensual feast”. The country wanted to demonstrate not only its literature, but also its dances and music, wines and foods. About 240 years after Captain James Cook’s circumvention and cartography of the North and South Island of Aotearoa, the Maori name for the “land of the long white cloud, and just 150 years after the publication of the first novel published in New Zealand, the country’s cultural riches will be shown on a world-wide stage.

New Zealand’s presentation will carry the theme “While you were sleeping – bevor es bei euch hell wird (“He moemoea he ohorere” in Maori).

The bi-lingual motto gives the clue: New Zealand is the home of not just one culture, but two – one brought to the country by its immigrants and the other that of the Maori people. C.K. Stead, a well-known New Zealand poet, uses these words to describe it literature:

“When we write in English, we are immersed in the tradition of English literature. Maori written literature is still young, but the oral tradition, myths and history are ancient.” For New Zealand, Stead continues, its own literature enhances the creation of a unique identity, it helps “us to define and recognize ourselves.”

Historically, New Zealand’s writers have been a well-kept secret on a global scale. Of the few known world-wide, Katherine Mansfield is the most famous, who lived in Europe over half her life. Other authors, such as Witi Ihimaera or Janet Frame, are familiar to a wider audience through the films made of their books, (“Whalerider”, “An Angel at my Table”) rather than the novels themselves. However, this is all set to change: not only by Sir Peter Jackson’s (“Lord of the Rings”) personal video-message to the Book Fair, but also through a concerted effort to paint a vivid and broad picture of New Zealand literary landscape. One example of this is the planned translation of 100 book by New Zealand authors into German by the opening of next year’s Book Fair.

To put this in perspective: overall, the Publishers Association of New Zealand consists of around 80 publishing companies who generate an annual profit of 550 million euros. The New Zealand Authors Collective Federation in P.E.N. counts over 1,300 members, and 2,000 books are published in New Zealand every year. The Frankfurt Book Fair is the world’s largest book fair with 283,000 visitors this year alone. In 2011, 7384 participants from 106 countries displayed their products and the event was written up by over 7,000 journalists. The Fair takes place in the second half of October of each year.