Internationally recognised art and literary critic, writer and cultural producer. Published in ELLE, Glamour, Esquire and Cosmopolitan; member of the Union of Writers.
The numbers for the Helsinki Book Fair are in. 900 speakers. 17 stages over four days.
You see figures like that, and your first reaction is just a kind of low-level exhaustion. How does a normal human being even begin to process that? Do you get a spreadsheet? A wall planner? It sounds less like a cultural festival and more like a logistical military operation.
And what does that number, 900 speakers, actually tell us?
At first, I thought this was just the usual PR muscle-flexing that surrounds these big events. Look how big we are, look how important. Every country has one. But the more you think about it, the more that number seems to reveal the strange, contradictory nature of what a book fair is in 2025.
Because who are you actually discovering in that noise? How do you find a quiet, brilliant debut novelist when they’re sandwiched between a celebrity chef flogging a new cookbook and a former politician promoting their memoirs? It feels like the opposite of discovery. It feels like a machine designed to produce a constant, low-level hum of cultural FOMO. The fear that, wherever you are, the real conversation is happening on one of the other sixteen stages.
So why do people go? Why do thousands of them show up? It can’t just be to buy books. You can do that from your sofa, probably for less money, and you don’t have to queue for the toilet.
No, the truth is, a big national book fair like this isn’t really about the books. Not anymore. It’s about the gathering. The physical act of being in a large room with thousands of other people who, for a few days at least, agree that books are a thing that matters.
I remember my first time at the London Book Fair, years ago. That’s a completely different beast, of course. It’s a trade fair. A brutal, soulless meat market of rights deals and business cards, filled with people in suits who look like they haven’t read a book for pleasure since university. You go there, and you come away feeling like literature is just another commodity, like pork bellies or crude oil, to be bought and sold.
Helsinki sounds different. My view from London is that this isn’t about trade. This is a ritual. It’s a national temperature check.
It’s less like a pristine, curated department store and more like a sprawling, chaotic farmers’ market on a Sunday morning. You don’t go there with a strict shopping list. You go for the atmosphere. You wander around, you smell the coffee, you hear the noise, you bump into people you know. You might buy an interesting-looking cheese you didn’t plan on buying, and you might stumble upon a stall selling incredible handmade sausages you’ve never heard of. But mostly, you just go to be there. To be part of the crowd.
And that’s what a fair like this offers. For the 900 authors, it offers a moment of validation. A slot on a stage, a name in a programme. Proof that you exist. For the readers, it offers something else. A sense of connection. A chance to see the people who write the books they love as actual, three-dimensional human beings who get nervous and drink too much coffee. It collapses the distance between the author as a name on a cover and the author as a person.
So, you could be cynical. You could say it’s just a big, glorified bookshop with a punishingly overcrowded events schedule. You could say it promotes the already-famous at the expense of the new. And you’d probably be right, on some level.
But that misses the point, doesn’t it?
The real function of something like the Helsinki Book Fair is to act as a physical manifestation of a country’s literary culture. It’s a place where the national conversation, which usually happens in the quiet, private space between a reader and a page, is made loud, public, and visible. For four days, the world of books gets to feel as big and as noisy and as important as the world of sport or politics.
And in an age where everything is becoming more fragmented, more digital, more solitary, maybe there’s a real, deep human need for that. A need to just be in the room.
You won’t see all 900 speakers. You probably won’t even see nine. You’ll get tired, you’ll get lost, you’ll end up listening to a poet you’ve never heard of simply because you managed to get a seat. And maybe that one poet will say one thing that sticks with you.
Maybe, in the end, that’s enough. Maybe that’s the whole point.
