Spare a thought for Tunisia, Guest of Honour in a fair that will be boycotted by the very publishers it most wants to connect with.

The 69th Belgrade Book Fair is scheduled to run 23-31 October, with Tunisia as guest of honour. Yet the halls may stand largely empty. Leading publishing houses are withdrawing en masse, and the dispute raises fundamental questions about who controls the most important literary event in the Balkans.

The Boycott Takes Shape

On 6 August, the Managing Board of the Serbian Publishers and Booksellers Association (UIKS), which represents roughly 140 members, recommended that its houses pull out of the Fair.

At that same session, ten publishers confirmed they would not participate: Laguna, Delfi, Kreativni centar, Čarobna knjiga, Partenon, Pčelica, Dereta, Finesa, IPC Media and Kontrast. The remaining members face a registration deadline of 20 August.

This is not an isolated protest. More than twenty members of the Association of Professional Publishers (UPIS) – including Arhipelag, Geopoetika and Clio – already sat out the 2025 Fair and announced in March 2026 that they would not return until exhibition conditions change.

Taken together, the two associations represent the backbone of Serbian publishing, from mass-market fiction to translated and academic lists.

Exclusion from the Board

The conflict crystallised in March 2026, when the Belgrade City Assembly elected a new Book Fair board that included not a single publisher representative. UIKS sent a letter demanding a seat at the table; the minutes record that no reply was received.

In May, publishers were offered observer status without voting rights, which unsurprisingly they rejected. Jelena Medaković, Belgrade’s Secretary of Culture, has maintained that there is no legal obligation to include publishers on the board.

The Business Case

The publishers’ decision is grounded in hard numbers. Visitor figures fell from 203,350 in 2024 to 134,750 in 2025 – a drop of 34 per cent in a single year.

The August minutes cite “the additional rise in costs and prices tied to organising a stand” as a further factor. When a nine-day stand no longer pays for itself, and when the body setting the terms includes no exhibitors, withdrawal becomes a matter of arithmetic rather than sentiment.

The View From The Beach

The Belgrade Book Fair traces its lineage to 1956 and has been held annually ever since, barring pandemic cancellations in 2020 and 2021. Publishers also warn that a planned relocation to the EXPO 27 site in Surčin poses “an extremely big and dangerous challenge” to the event’s identity.

After 20 August, the debate shifts from board composition to a more practical question: how to fill four halls with no major domestic publishers present.

For an industry that has relied on the Fair as its annual shop window, the stakes could not be higher.

And spare a thought for Tunisia, Guest of Honour in a fair that will be boycotted by the very publishers it most wants to connect with.

This post first appeared in the TNPS LinkedIn newsfeed.