Spanish book fair and street party draws a million

GIJON, Spain, July 22 (Reuters Life!) - Spain's annual Semana Negra book fair has for more than 20 years combined a week-long street party with a literary festival and this year drew a million visitors in what organisers say is one of the biggest cultural events in Europe.

The Semana Negra ("Noir Week") began in 1987 as a gathering of crime writers in the northern Spanish port of Gijon, which aimed to knock down the walls between high-brow and "genre" fiction.

Its founder was Mexican writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II, who has made the New York Times books of the year list with his detective novels, but has also won awards in Mexico as a historian.

He says the July festival nowadays also aims to keep people reading in the digital age and this year it sold 51,000 books.

"If literature is confined to universities and museums, we'll lose people on the street. In the 21st century, we have to win over readers, because apart from being a great pleasure, reading paves the way for critical thinking," he said.

This year's festival site is the beach at Gijon, with a group of marquees housing book launches, film screenings and exhibitions in the middle of a wider summer fairground, with a Ferris wheel and stalls selling traditional food from the local Asturias region.

An eclectic mix of sideshows includes re-enacting the epic 331 B.C. battle between the forces of Alexander the Great and Darius III, using tin soldiers, and a photographic journalism show drawing attention to human rights abuses around the world.

But the mainstay is a gathering of more than 130 authors from around the world who award prizes for crime novels and documentaries written in Spanish on behalf of the International Association of Crime Writers.

OVERNIGHT REVELRY

The pace of the Semana Negra is so hectic that organisers publish a daily newspaper "A Quemarropa" ("at point-blank range") with a guide to forthcoming events and reports on activities and festivities often going on until dawn.

High-brow writers who attended this year included Spanish novelist and scriptwriter Jorge Semprun, who won fame with his memoir "The Long Voyage", about surviving the Buchenwald concentration camp in World War II.

Now 85, Semprun found the energy to lead a poetry reading at 1 a.m., and checked out of his hotel at 8 a.m. the following morning to catch a flight home.

Apart from the festive side, crime writing also entails denouncing human rights abuses and this year´s fair issued a book commemorating writers who risked their lives to expose the demise of democracy in Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

Also invited were specialists from other genres, like Canadian author R. Scott Bakker - who made Publisher's Weekly's Best of 2004 list. - and U.S. comic book writer and artist Phoebe Gloeckner.

Bakker said the festival helped him to overcome the scorn often levelled at genre writers.

"It's not only something that has gained respect and an international profile, but is just massive, it attracts hundreds of thousands of people," he said.

"It's been a revelation, it fills me with hope that the old literary bigotries will be torn down." (Reporting by Martin Roberts, editing by Paul Casciato)