While the Frankfurt Book Fair is known primarily as a rights fair—where book publishers, agents, and literary scouts gather to buy and sell translation and distribution rights—it’s also an opportunity for librarians to get a sense of the international children’s literature landscape. This global lens for library collections offers what children’s literature scholar and educator Rudine Sims Bishop calls “windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors” into other cultures for communities across the United States.

“The Frankfurt Book Fair is an ideal venue for our goal of promoting and raising awareness of high-quality children's and young adult literature internationally, whether it’s librarians ordering books for their libraries, or a publisher or agency potentially buying translation rights,” said Oliver Ilan Schulz, editor for French-language children’s and young adult literature at the International Youth Library Foundation.

On stage at the Frankfurt Book Fair

The opening day of the 2025 Frankfurt Book Fair was a crisp and cloudy Wednesday in mid-October. That morning, publishers, literary agents, rights directors, and scouts from around the world streamed into a vast complex of convention centers.

Inside the studio in Hall 4, Schulz and Jochen Weber of the International Youth Library Foundation in Munich were fitted with microphones as they prepared to announce the 2025 White Ravens list, an annual selection of recommended children’s and young adult books chosen for literary quality and originality.

The list this year features 215 titles—including picture books, poetry, fairy tales, and middle-grade fiction and nonfiction—in 49 languages and from 63 countries from around the world.

Oliver Ilan Schulz and Jochen Weber from the International Youth Library Foundation in Munich present the 2025 White Ravens List at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Among the standout titles presented were Chop Chop, a Finnish-Swedish picture book about a robot overwhelmed by the relentless pace of automation; Do You Read Me?, an illustrated nonfiction title from Ukraine about the many forms of communication between people, animals, and plants; and The Man, the River, and the Chest, a Brazilian picture book about humanity’s attempt to control the natural world.

The list is posted on the International Youth Library’s website with selections from all previous years. The database includes a review of each book in English to reach a global audience, and information can be sorted by country, language, and topic keywords.

Schulz cited family, friendship, grief, nature, and climate change as themes present in this year’s list, adding that “it was personally important to me to include a French nonfiction book that provides as objective information as possible about the historical and political causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

Inside the White Ravens selections and IBBY lists

Founded after World War II by Jella Lepman, a Jewish author and journalist, the International Youth Library was envisioned as a place to “build bridges between cultures, nations, and languages” through books, according to Jochen Weber, head of the editorial department at the International Youth Library Foundation.

With early support from the American Library Association (ALA) and the Rockefeller Foundation, the library amassed a collection over decades that today consists of more than 700,000 titles in nearly 50 languages.

Lepman also went on to establish the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY), a sister organization still dedicated to global literacy and children’s literature. While the International Youth Library curates the annual White Ravens list—selecting standout titles from nearly 9,000 submissions received in a single year—IBBY develops its own recommended lists that they bring to book fairs in Bologna, Shanghai, and Guadalajara.

These IBBY lists include the Hans Christian Andersen Award candidates submitted by member countries. This is an honor presented biennially to one author and one illustrator whose complete works have made a lasting contribution to children’s literature worldwide.

Carolina Ballester, IBBY Executive Director, also highlighted the organization’s selection of Outstanding Books for Young People with Disabilities. “The list has become very popular in schools and educational training centers, where it is used as a tool to discuss reading and special needs,” she said. “My dream for this collection is to become a source of inspiration for mainstream publishers to adapt these books, translate them, and make them as accessible as possible.”

Around the world in the exhibit halls

While the annual Bologna Book Fair in Italy specifically focuses on children’s literature each spring, the Frankfurt Book Fair held annually in October also offers youth-related programming. At Frankfurt this year, the subconference “Children’s Books in a Fragile World” focused on the role of children’s publishing amid rising illiteracy, censorship, and attacks on intellectual freedom. Panel discussions addressed how publishers, librarians, and educators can defend access to diverse stories that reflect children’s real lives and identities in an increasingly polarized world.

Messe Frankfurt hosts the Frankfurt Book Fair.

In addition, 600 independent international children’s and YA book publishers exhibited in stands across the halls of the fair. Both overwhelming and inspiring, walking through the Frankfurt Book Fair felt like stepping into a map of global book publishing.

In one aisle in Hall 5, picture books from Brazil were displayed above a lively and crowded rights meeting. In another row lined with green walls, books by Irish authors included a section featuring children’s publisher O’Brien Press. Across the hall, representatives in traditional dress from Kazakhstan held meetings, and in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia booth, highlights from children’s publishers like Ugarit Publishing punctuated endcaps on tables where visitors stopped to sit.

At the IBBY stand in Hall 6, the Hans Christian Andersen Award nominee titles were displayed side-by-side in a variety of languages. And walking back through the other side of hall 5, European publishers had stands of colorful books for children from Germany, Spain, Portugal, Poland, France, and Italy.

Books on display in a range of languages in the International Board on Books for Young People stand.

Bringing international literature home

Even amid publishers and representatives from around the world, there were some familiar American faces. Foreword magazine, which covers books from independent publishers, had a stand at the fair. Founder and publisher Victoria Sutherland explained that Foreword frequently reviews international titles in English from children’s book publishers that already have U.S. distribution.

She added that the magazine also features international titles in its translation coverage, which “stems from a growing interest among our librarians, booksellers, and avid readers in knowing how the rest of the world thinks.”

Victoria Sutherland, left, the publisher of Foreword magazine with Paul Graller of the American Library Association.

ALA exhibits at the Frankfurt Book Fair each year for three reasons, according to Paul Graller, who organizes ALA Annual exhibits. He said the association hopes to “raise ALA’s profile internationally, to meet and mingle with existing ALA conference exhibitors and new prospects to educate them on the value and potential of the U.S. library market, and to meet with librarians who may be ALA members living or working abroad.”

While the global literature discoveries and access to recommendation lists can be inspiring for public and school libraries hoping to build more international collections, there are practical challenges in buying these titles. Ingram is working with Lightning Source to make more international titles available—particularly those that are popular or award-winning abroad. But many titles lack U.S. distribution rights altogether, and differences in book design, bindings, and even transliteration of author names can complicate cataloging and discoverability. For now, only a limited number of titles from the White Ravens and IBBY lists can be sourced through Ingram, and establishing accounts with specialty distributors is necessary for ordering many of these titles for library collections in the United States.

The 2025 Frankfurt Book Fair demonstrated the publishing industry’s commitment to fostering international understanding through books. In her autobiography, A Bridge of Children’s Books, Lepman writes that her collection of youth literature from around the world “demonstrates the bond that unites children of all countries, regardless of nationalistic boundaries.” Global collections begin with a library’s impulse to help young readers see themselves in stories from their own cultures and languages, while also connecting them to the wider world.