Piero Crocenzi

Piero Crocenzi (Avezzano, February 12, 1979).

During his studies in Management Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Turin, he became a member of the Associazione Universitaria JEToP. In this context, he took his first steps in event organization by creating Carriera & Futuro, the career day of the Polytechnic University of Turin.

In 2002, he was called by the Fondazione per il Libro, la Musica e la Cultura  to organize Mestieri in Mostra – the Salon of Professional Opportunities, a collaboration that continued as the head of the Technical Office of the Salone Internazionale del Libro di Torino from 2007 to 2019.

In 2006, along with Silvio Viale and Barbara Carena, he founded Eventi 3 srl, a company specialized in organizing trade fairs and conferences, currently active in Italy and abroad with dozens of events organized and held every year, employing more than 20 people.

Since 2006, he has been in charge of the technical office of the Fiera della Piccola e Media editorial di Roma, Più libri più liberi, which is held at the Nuvola Eur Convention Center.

For ten years, from 2008 to 2018, he was the Head of the Technical Office of Terra Madre, Salone Internazionale del Gusto, and some Slow Food events such as Cheese and Slow Fish.

In 2018, following the liquidation of the Fondazione per il Libro, la Musica e la Cultura, he became a member of the Associazione Torino, la città del libro.

The Association won the auction for the brand of the Turin International Book Fair and became its owner.

From 2019 to the present, he has held the role of CEO of Salone Libro srl, a company that organizes, markets, and communicates the Salone Internazionale del Libro di Torino on behalf of the Association.

Piero Crocenzi is passionate about natural wines: from this interest, two projects were born, C’era una voltaand Augusta, natural wine fairs in Italy that welcome dozens of producers from all over Europe every year.

Sakari Luovio

Sakari Luovio is Chief Sales Officer at Adlibris.com since 2016, the market leading online-bookseller in the Nordics with strong presence also in brick & mortar. Before Adlibris Sakari was Head of Sales in the Nordics at Canadian publishing house Harlequin Enterprises and between the jobs within the book industry he was responsible for the sales in Nordics at Warner Bros for few years. He is also a Vice Chairman in the Booksellers Association of Finland since 2019, with the agenda to improve the business environment of Finnish bookstores and their interests. At Adlibris Sakari has set the commercial omnichannel strategy where the book is in the very center of it supported by the nonbooks-categories together with a data driven customer-obsessed organization. Sakari has a deep understanding of the dynamics of the book industry in the Nordics and in customer and monetary value drivers within ecommerce. Sakari has learning as his key personal driver – continuously learning how to optimize the omnichannel customer experience that converts to maximal sales.

Marta Martínez

Marta Martínez, the CEO of Grupo Anaya / Hachette for Spain and Latin America since 2020, graduated in Business Administration from St. Louis University, Missouri, and holds a Master’s Degree from the Instituto de Empresa.

With over 30 years of professional experience, she has worked across various sectors, including media, internet, and telecommunications. For the past 15 years, her focus has been on education and publishing, both in European and Latin American markets, where she has led business and digital transformation initiatives in Macmillan Education and Grupo Anaya.

Additionally, Marta Martínez is a member of the Education Publishing Association Board in Spain and serves on the Hachette Livre International Executive Board.

Marifé Boix

Marifé Boix García is Vice President for Southern Europe and Latin America at Frankfurter Buchmesse GmbH. Since 2012, she organises the CONTEC conferences in different Latin American countries, a meeting between publishing and innovation professionals. She is also responsible for the Frankfurt Invitation Programme. Further she represents the Frankfurter Buchmesse in the EU project Aldus Up, which consists of a network of European Bookfairs. She was in charge of the Catalan Culture as guest of honor in 2007, Argentina in 2010, Brazil in 2013, Spain in 2022 and she works now towards the guest of honor Chile in 2027.

Juergen Boos

Juergen Boos trained as a publisher at Herder Verlag (Freiburg) in the early 1980s and has degrees in both Marketing and Organisational Theory. He has held management positions at Droemer Knaur Verlag (Munich), Carl Hanser Verlag (Munich), as well as Springer Science and Business Media (today Springer Science) and John Wiley & Sons (Weinheim). He became President and CEO of the Frankfurter Buchmesse GmbH (Frankfurt Book Fair) in 2005 and is President of LITPROM (Society for the Promotion of African, Asian and Latin American Literature) and Managing Director of LitCam (Frankfurter Buchmesse Literacy Campaign).

On 20 November 2013, he was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art. In January 2017, Juergen Boos received an honorary degree from the Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University. In February 2018, he was conferred the cultural distinction of “Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres“(Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters) at the French embassy in Berlin. Furthermore, he is holder of the Spanish Order Isabel la Católica, Encomienda de Numero since October 2022 and of the Ribbon of Knight of the Royal Norwegian Order of Merit since February 2023. He is also a member of the Scientific Committee of Sheikh Zayed Book Award and a member of Akademie Deutscher Buchpreis (German Book Prize Academy).

Jason Kelly

Jason is a co-founder and the Chief Legal Officer of Sounded.com, a real-time audiobook production platform and online book store which launched at the London Book Fair in 2023. He has practiced law in the field of IP Rights and technology for 20 years. This includes through previous roles with B2B Software developers and B2C facing business involved in regulated market sectors. Through his role at Sounded.com he is a member of the UK Publishers Association ‘Audio Publishing Group’ and a member of the Audio Publishers Association in the United States, where he advocates for DRM standards across the audio industry and also the ethical use of AI.

Searsha Sadek

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Searsha Sadek is the Founder and Chief Product Officer of Shimmr AI, an AI-powered marketing platform for publishing that matches books to new audiences and generates campaigns faithful to each title’s DNA. A psychologist by training, she was a strategist at leading ad agencies and CRO of an AI brand management company before founding Shimmr. She writes a monthly column for BookBrunch, has academic work on AI and cultural evolution forthcoming, and speaks internationally on the future of publishing. Outside work, you’ll find her wild swimming, drinking tea, kickboxing, and of course, reading.

Emma House

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Emma House is an international publishing consultant. She started her book publishing career at The London Book Fair before joining the UK Publishers Association in 2009. Emma occupied various roles at the PA and finished her tenure at Deputy CEO before establishing her international consultancy.
Emma is the chair of the SNSi coalition for the academic journal publishing sector, vice-chair of the UK Publishing Training Centre and on the advisory board for the Oxford Brookes Centre for International Publishing. She is the co-founder of Publishers Without Borders and a former advisory board member of PublisHer.

Gvantsa Jobava

Gvantsa Jobava (1986) is the Vice President of the International Publishers Association (IPA) and the past president of Georgian Publishers and Booksellers Association (currently the GPBA board member). She holds the position of the Head of International Affairs and the head of translated Fiction/Nonfiction department at Intelekti Publishing, one of the leading publishing houses in Georgia. In addition, she is a member of Women Publishers’ International Network – PublisHer. In 2020 she joined PEN Georgia.

In 2021-2022 in the frames of UNESCO’s “Tbilisi World Book Capital 2021” project, Gvantsa has founded the first Tbilisi Children Books Festival; Children Books Literary Award NAKADULI; The first Caucasus and Black Sea Basin Countries’ Regional Publishing Conference, etc.

Since 2013, Gvantsa Jobava has been lobbying for the Georgian publishing industry, advocating Georgian publishers’ interests and rights, standing for copyright and freedom to Publish and Freedom of Expression in Georgia. She has managed a number of projects to promote Georgian publishing and literary industry at international level, including Georgia’s “Guest of Honour” publishing program at the 2018 Frankfurt Book Fair. In 2017 and 2018, she organized Georgian writers’ and publishers’ peaceful performances – ‘STOP RUSSIA’ against Russian occupation, at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

 

In 2016 she founded World Read Aloud Day in Georgia, as well as the special award “Book Supporter of the Year”.

In 2017 she organized Nobel Prize Winner, Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich’s visit to Georgia. In 2013-2022 she was the organizer of Tbilisi International Book Festival.

 

Gvantsa Jobava is a poet and the translator of works of John Steinbeck, Chinua Achebe, Saul Bellow, John Lennon and others. She has also translated Anna Politkovskaya’s book “Putin’s Russia” and “A Message from Ukraine” by Volodymyr Zelensky into Georgian. She is the author and editor of the publishing project “Banned Books Shelf” and the founder of Banned Books Week celebrations in Georgia.

Karla Paniagua

Phd in cultural studies, Master in social anthropology, communication specialist. She directs the Design of Tomorrow specialty at CENTRO, where she also co-edits the magazine Economía Creativa and leads the UNESCO Chair Design Methods for Democratic Access to the Imagination of the Future. She is the author of three books, she is working on the fourth for Santillana publishing house. She hosts the radio program The Future Was Yesterday and in her leisure  time, she is a gardener.