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 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 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 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 is the Founder and Chief Product Officer of Shimmr, a company that
‘brings books to life’ through automated advertising campaigns. An expert in using AI
for marketing and at the cutting edge of developments, Searsha gives tips on how
every publisher and author can use technology to get their titles ahead. At Shimmr,
she uses this capability to match books to new audiences to maximise
discoverability, while generate advertising faithful to each book's DNA – bringing its
human genius to wider attention. Searsha trained as a psychologist, spent many
years in leading advertising agencies, and was Chief Revenue Officer of an AI-brand
management company. Outside work, you can find her swimming, drinking
tea, kickboxing – and of course, reading.

Emma House is an international publishing consultant based in the UK. She has over 20 years experience in the global publishing industry having held senior roles at The London Book Fair and The Publishers Association (UK). As a consultant Emm helps businesses navigate the international publishing world through research, business development, event curation and project management. Emma is a former board member of PublisHer and is a member of the advisory board for the Oxford International Centre for Publishing.

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.

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.

Richard Charkin is a former president of the International Publishers Association and the United Kingdom’s Publishers Association. For 11 years, he was executive director of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. He has held many senior posts at Macmillan, Oxford University Press, Current Science Group, and Reed Elsevier. He is a member of the international advisory board of Frankfurter Buchmesse, and is a senior adviser to nkoda.com and Shimmr AI, a non-executive director of Liverpool University Press, and Cricket Properties Ltd., and has founded his own business, Mensch Publishing. He is the author, with Tom Campbell, of ‘My Back Pages; An Undeniably Personal History of Publishing 1972-2022, that will be published in Spanish later this year.

John Martin is the former CEO of Sanoma Learning (HQ in Helsinki, Finland) and is currently Chairman of ILT Education (HQ in Stockholm, Sweden), Board Member of Infinitas Learning (HQ in Utrecht, The Netherlands) and an advisor and investor in various education and edtech companies across the continent.

He has broad experience in the market for learning solutions having led companies that serve some 15M students and 1.5M teachers across Europe and has extensive expertise in internationalisation and digital transformation. 

Prior to joining Sanoma, John worked in strategy consulting (ContentConnected) and in science publishing (Wolters Kluwer). He has a Ph.D. in bioinformatics.