Prague Book Tower 2026: The Perfect Book Fair for Multilinguals

Sep 29

6 min read

I've been reporting from one of the biggest bookfairs in the world – London Book Fair (LBF) for years, since 2009. Each year it features over a 1,000 exhibitors, over 34,000 professional attendees. Sounds impressive, right? Yes, but it has also become very... boring! No personal chats with authors, you can meet publishers by prior appointment only, and small publishers are lumped together under their countries' national flags, as if publishing is strictly the matter of your country's Department for Foreign Affairs... As a writer and reader of books, I feel lost at giant bookfairs like LBF. I want something more personal. Something where English is not the only language and where I can shake hands with the authors.

This is exactly what I have found at the third Prague Book Tower 2026 (PBT) – a smorgasbord of languages (Czech, English, French, German, Russian, Ukrainian and others) – and a cosy, relaxed atmosphere where visitors could personally, without prior appointment, TALK TO PUBLISHERS AND AUTHORS. Over the course of three days, the fair was attended by approximately 3,000 people, 4,820 books were sold, 37 publishers, libraries, and bookstores were represented, and 64 events for adults and children were held with the participation of 135 speakers. One thing that you could do at PBT that you can't do at LBF is BUY ACTUAL BOOKS! At PBT you could buy as many books as you could carry, and you even got freebies like tote bags and magazines as a thank you for your purchase. Your purchase supported small independent publishers – true heroes of our times. Imagine being a small publisher fighting off the Big Five (and the notorious Russian giant Eksmo-AST). It is a true mission, and it is our job as consumers and readers to support independent publishers and bookshops!

So what were the major insights of the Prague Book Tower 2026?

Insight One: stop thinking in one language! Monolingualism and promotion of just one language is what the famous Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie called "the danger of the single story"! Monolingualism is what was wrong with the empires – Holy Roman, British, USSR. Read, write, and publish in MULTIPLE languages! Embrace the freedom to express and accept multiple language perspectives!

There were several publishers who truly made the Prague Book Tower multilingual, among them:

Sandermoen Publishing (est. 2016 and publishing books in 7 (!!!) languages (English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Ukrainian);
Tamizdat Project (est. 2022): I fell in love with their book "Alphabet Soup: The Translingual Sayings of Emma and Eva as Recorded by Their Father", by Eugene Ostashevsky. It is a fun record of the linguistic adventures of Turkish-German-Russian-American family and their move from New York to Berlin;
Freedom Letters (est. 2023 and publishing uncensored, anti-war literature in Russian and Ukrainian, but also occasionally in English and Belarusian);
Oktan Print (est. in Ukraine in 1997 and in the Czech Republic since 2017; publishing books in English, Czech, German, Russian and Ukrainian).

Books by Sandermoen Publishing (Switzerland) come out in seven languages

(Photo Copyright: Sandermoen Publishing ©)

Insight Two: It's about quality, not quantity of your readers! Today we are witnessing a true nascence of niche books and authors answering our most specialised interests. For example, it is no longer necessary to sieve through generic literature about the Gulag: depending on your interests, you can now choose between a book written by a survivor of the Gulag prisons for children (Julian Better, Child of the Gulag, Sandermoen Publishing); or a book about a horticulturalist Vladimir Nikolaevich Degtyarev who, as a prisoner, established a tree garden in the Solovki camp (Alisa Kusti, Dendrarium. Five gardens of the prisoner Degtyarev, Shell(f)). Similarly, if you are interested in autofiction, you no longer need to read something remotely close to your life: you can choose between a book about motherhood, a book about search for identity between Tel Aviv and Berlin, or a book about a middle-life crisis in Canada. Yes, these books will not sell a million copies like John Grisham or Dan Brown, but they will find a more intimate, thoughtful readership.

Admittedly, smaller sales in modern book publishing make it more difficult for writers and publishers to "find" their readers, but on the plus side this creates a wider choice of authors on the market: so, less chance of writers getting dizzy from their multi-million success, causing a cult-like following. Personally, I'd rather read five books written by five different authors than one book written by a best-selling megalomaniac. But feel free to choose your own path.

"Alphabet Soup", by Eugene Ostashevsky (Tamizdat Project) inspires multilingualism in families

Highlight Three: the rise of women writers! And publishers! While men are busy solving the world's problems, women are finally telling their stories and supporting each other. Best books, best bookshops, best writers' communities seem to be organised by women in the book industry. My favourite two panels at PBT were women-led:

Panel on 11 September 2026: Alena Machoninová's novel "Hella": (not) returning home, featuring the author herself, "Hella" translator Olga Nazarova, actress Yulia Aug, and the panel moderator translator Anna Agapova, author of the Telegram channel about Czech literature "Too Loud Solitude" (@tooloudsolitude).

Panel on 12 September 2026: Home Away from Home: Russian-Language Literature on Emigration, featuring five writers Julia Efremenkova, Alisa Kusti, Anastasia Veprev, Egana Djabbarova and Dasha Okhotsimskaya, and moderated by Anya Kladova, co-founder of the Berlin bookstore "Children of Gutenberg" and project coordinator of the PANDA platform.

So, to sum up, multilingualism, personalised, intimate readership, and the rise of women writers and publishers are my top highlights from the Prague Book Tower 2026. But these are just my personal takeaways from the fair – PBT was so diverse that everyone found there what they were looking for. Most importantly, there was mutual understanding and passion for one thing – books. Hashtag books not bombs. If only books could bring peace: I'd go to that bookfair immediately!

Full list of participants included:

1 | Sandermoen publishing

2 | Turgenev Library in Paris (France) + Biblio.tečka

3 | Deep Sky

4 | Überbau

5 | Virgola Press

6 | Liberty Books Lisbon

7 | Booksy.place

8 | YMCA-PRESS

9 | Oktan Print

10 | ONE BOOK Publishing

11 | Babel Books Tel Aviv

12 | Slovanská knihovna (Slavonic library, Czechia)

13 | Fresh Verlag

14 | ISIA Media Verlag

15 | BAbook

16 | Echo Books

17 | Éditions Tourgueneff

18 | Memorial society

19 | Vidim Books

20 | Meduza

21 | Hyperboreus / Interbok

22 | Babel Books Berlin

23 | Kust Press

24 | Nove mesto books, Prague

25 | Inache media

26 | Russian tradition (émigré project based in Czechia)

27 | Tamizdat Project

28 | SamTamBooks

Some extra insights from the Prague Book Tower 2026 attendees:

Olga Nazarova, Translator, book lover:

The organisation was amazing, the location is very convenient, a number of publishers was very much representative and there was a lot of great books to buy. I liked that presentations started and finished on time. Thanks for inviting the poets to recite their poems – the event on the last day of the fair. It was pure joy.

Olga Horn, Author, reader, LGMW member:

The most important thing was connecting with other authors, publishers, and bloggers. But it’s always interesting to see new books too.

Elena Khomutova-Miller, Writer, reader:

As a writer, this trip was an important step for me and an opportunity to get to know the contemporary literary scene. Since the publication of my first novel in 2023, I have chosen the path of self-publishing, so I was particularly interested in seeing what is happening in the publishing world today. At the same time, getting to know publishers was not my main goal — they already have plenty of authors to publish without me. Much more important was meeting writers like myself, getting to know book bloggers, journalists, reading-club organisers, translators, and, especially, authors who, like me, write in two languages. I wanted to experience this literary scene from the inside, to find my professional community — like-minded people and fellow writers. And from that perspective, the trip turned out to be particularly interesting and valuable for me.