The sixth annual Brooklyn Book Festival starts Sunday with a broad range of authors from around the world.
“Even though the festival is set in Brooklyn and has a Brooklyn flavor, it’s an international festival,” said Johnny Temple, the publisher of Akashic Books and the chairman of the Brooklyn Literary Council, which leads the planning of the festival, as reported by the New York Times. “We bring in authors from all over the world. It is not a Brooklyn-focused or Brooklyn-oriented festival.”
Over 260 authors and other participants are included in the festival events lineup, the New York Times reports. Many of them are regulars, like Jhumpa Lahiri, the Pulitzer Prize winner who will be honored with the “Best of Brooklyn” Award (or BoBi) for outstanding contributions to literature.
The festival will also feature writers like Larry McMurtry, Joyce Carol Oates and Fran Lebowitz, who are strongly identified with places outside Brooklyn, according to the New York Times.
It has certainly grown since its early days, when the gathering was much smaller and more local, says Christine Onorati of Word bookstore in Greenpoint.
“It was definitely a much smaller scale,” Onorati told the New York Times. “You felt it was very centered on what was happening in Brooklyn. Now it’s like a celebration of books for everything, not just Brooklyn.”
But despite its international growth, the local feel of the festival still persists.
“So many conferences take place in giant hotels,” said Emma Straub, the author of the short-story collection “Other People We Married” and a bookseller at BookCourt, a popular Cobble Hill store, the New York Times reports. “Everybody gets to go home at night because it’s in Brooklyn.”
