Sulaimani International Book Fair records 500k visitors
ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – Shawqi Omer, Deputy Director General of the Sulaimani International Book Fair, on Thursday told Kurdistan 24 that the fair had about 500,000 visitors in 10 days.
"Half of the visitors were from Sulaimani and the other half were residents who came to the fair from other cities of Iraq and the Kurdistan Region," Omer added.
The International Book Fair in Sulaimani began on Nov. 27 and ended on Dec. 6.
"Tens of thousands of people visited the fair daily, mostly young people," Omar noted and revealed, "This year there has been a great demand for books. We hope that reading literature will become ingrained in our culture.”
Furthermore, he stated that this year, 20 countries and 200 publishing houses participated in the fair.
Despite the large turnout, some Kurdish intellectuals on social media and in TV interviews have frequently criticized the organizers of the fair because they prioritized the presence of Islamic publishing houses—some of which publish radicalist, and fundamentalist concepts—and there were not many secular publishers at the fair.
The critics have appealed to have the fair be more open to modern values.
The Kurdistan Region has 92 libraries containing nearly 859,000 books in the following provinces:
Erbil: 30 libraries containing 277,000 books.
Sulaimani: 26 libraries containing 351,000 books.
Duhok: 8 libraries containing 74,000 books.
Halabja: 6 libraries containing 33,000 books.
Raparin: 12 libraries containing 40,000 books.
Garmiyan: 10 libraries containing 84,000 books.