ABOUT THE FOCUS COUNTRY

Turkish Press and Publishers Copyright and Licencing Society organize the İstanbul Publishing Fellowship Program with the support of the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism and contributions of İstanbul Governorate and İstanbul Chamber of Commerce. The objective of this program is to facilitate export of Turkish cultural products and to turn İstanbul into a copyrights market. Every year, the program brings together many domestic and international publishers.

İstanbul Publishing Fellowship Program was first organized in 2016 to increase cooperation between Turkish and foreign publishers. In the past 5 years, the Fellowship meetings resulted in more than 3.000 preliminary copyrights sales agreements through more than 6.000 B2B meetings. Every year, the program achieved significant progress with higher number of participants year after year.

One of the novelties introduced in the 6th year of the organization will be a “focus country”, whose publishing sector and literature will form the thematic focus of the event. The objective of the İstanbul Publishing Fellowship Focus Country component is to promote the publishing sector of the selected country to the world. The first focus country is Azerbaijan - Turkey’s neighbour and sister country.

Through selection of Azerbaijan as the focus country of İstanbul Publishing Fellowship 2021, we would also like to communicate a message that Turkish literature and publication sector is not limited to Turkey, but rather encompasses a larger geography. Turkish is spoken in many countries around the world, and it is a long-established literary language. To generate an international interest in Turkish language, Azerbaijan was named as the first focus country of İstanbul Fellowship Publishing program.

The İstanbul Publishing Fellowship Focus Country component will also seek to improve business relations between Turkey and the selected focus country in terms of publication, to make sure the focus country is better known by the professional publishers which are the fundamental constituents of the cultural world, and to bring about new success stories in the world book markets for the selected country. The 6th İstanbul Fellowship Program will take place on 9-10-11 March 2021. Azerbaijan will hand over the “focus country” flag to Mexico in the 7th İstanbul Publishing Fellowship in March 2022.