The special guest of the seventh edition of Forum Edita –which closed its doors yesterday in Barcelona– was the Emirati princess Bodour Al Qasimi (Sharjah, 1978), president of the International Publishers Association (IPA), that brings together all the publishers in the world. Coming from a country that is usually associated more with football than with reading, Bodour Al Qasimi is the daughter of the emir of Sharjah –one of the seven emirates in the country– and became an editor fifteen years ago, “seeing that my 4-year-old daughter years he did not like to read books in Arabic, he only wanted them in English. As a mother, I was disappointed and wanted to publish interesting books for children in Arabic. Today, in the Kalimat group we already publish many more things, not only for children, and a lot of translations”.
Two of the pillars of the IPA, along with the defense of copyright, are freedom of expression and publication. “Without freedom there is no creativity,” he says. We organize debates about it in different places, including of course countries with problems, we talk to governments… And we give the Voltaire Prize to publishers who have distinguished themselves by defending freedom, sometimes spending time in jail or even being killed because of the books they published.” Regarding the attack against Salman Rushdie, he is blunt: “What has happened is totally horrible and barbaric, we have issued a statement about it and redoubled our commitment so that authors can express themselves freely and publishers spread their works.”
She admits that publishing is one of the few industries where there is any presence of women in positions of power… “although that depends. In fact, I am only the second female president of the IPA, founded… in 1896! There is a problem of diversity, this has been an association run basically by European men, and here I am now, a woman and an Arab”.
If Spanish opens the doors of Latin America to its Spanish colleagues, the Arabic language, he explains, “which is spoken in 21 countries, shares the same written language in all of them, classical Arabic, is a huge market in which, however, , we suffered a distribution problem”.
Al Qasimi has created a foundation that sends books – “the new ones and in perfect condition, not remnants or defective copies”, he clarifies – to refugee camps and poor areas, where they also build libraries.
He says that “piracy, especially digital piracy, has worsened with the pandemic” and expresses his concern that “governments understand that they have to fight against it. We must emphasize that downloading a pirated book is stealing, those who infringe copyright are not criminal minds, they are the most normal people, teachers, anyone… and plain and simple it is theft. We must raise awareness of this to protect the livelihood of authors, publishers and all those who are part of the process”.
Do you recommend a book? After thinking about it for a few seconds, he replies: “The ornament of the world, by María Rosa Menocal, I read it when I visited Granada last year and it is an excellent work, which shows how Muslims, Jews and Christians created a culture of tolerance in medieval Spain” .
