Contentious classics, book-to-screen adaptations and the future of festival funding were some of the hottest topics at this week’s London book fair, which saw around 30,000 agents, authors, translators, publishers and other industry professionals meet in Olympia, London, across three days to hammer out rights deals and discuss the future of publishing. Here is our roundup of some of the takeaways from this year’s fair, and a taste of the books we can expect to see in shops in the near future.

Festival funding

In case you missed last summer’s festival funding fiasco: fund manager Baillie Gifford came under fire for its investments in fossil fuels and companies linked to Israel, which resulted in partnerships between the firm and nine literary festivals it sponsored being cut. At this week’s fair, English PEN made the bold but much-needed move to get the stakeholders in the same room at the same time.

A representative of the campaign group Fossil Free Books, Jessica Gaitán Johannesson, said that its members had seen an opportunity to make a difference and protest injustices that many of them had written about. However, Fiona Razvi, the director of Wimbledon BookFest – which had previously been sponsored by Baillie Gifford – said that “attacking an investment company which passed our scrutiny, which we were very happy with – they were a force for good, as far as I can see, in our industry – I’m not so sure that was the right way”, to loud applause.

Book-to-screen adaptations

It feels like an exciting time for book-to-screen adaptations, with The Thursday Murder Club and Guillermo del Toro’s version of Frankenstein among many other much-anticipated films in the works. Indeed, films based on books typically do significantly better at the box office than those with original screenplays. The challenge of turning novels into films and series went under the microscope at this year’s fair, with authors and producers each pulling back the curtain on the obstacle-ridden process. Lucy Clarke, whose book The Castaways was turned into a hit series for Paramount+, said that she never writes specifically for screen, but “obviously there’s that lovely glittery hope that maybe it’ll get picked up”.

Romance

Love was in the air at the fair, with a spate of new acquisitions in the romance and romance-adjacent space: Tess Sharpe’s romance-action thriller No Body No Crime; a three-book series by BookTok star Tierney Page; Patrick Ness’s novel Meridian; and Remain, a romantic thriller from Nicholas Sparks and M Night Shyamalan. Plus, queen of romantasy Rebecca Yarros will have her blockbuster Empyrean books, beginning with Fourth Wing, adapted into a six-part graphic novel series. “There is something so special about seeing your words come to life through art,” she said.

Contentious classics

What should publishers do with classic books containing offensive language or ideas? They might include footnotes or an introduction by a contemporary author to add context. Or they might decide the text isn’t worth publishing any more.

Children are handed classics and told “this is something that you must revere, this is something you must value”, said Aimée Felone, managing director of children’s publisher Knights Of. Yet, a “classic” is a “socially constructed” thing, said Maria Bedford, editorial director at Scribe. Whether or not to continue publishing problematic work by historically admired authors is a nuanced, ever-changing conversation that publishers are still working out how to have, the fair’s panel made clear.

Getting people reading

Developing the next generation of readers was a key focus of talks at the fair. Authors Kit de Waal and Clare Mackintosh discussed the literacy “crisis”, while Waterstones CEO James Daunt and Hachette CEO David Shelley discussed ways the industry could help tackle the decline in children reading for pleasure. However, it wasn’t all negative: Daunt reported that “kids are in the stores everywhere, on both sides of the Atlantic”.

Biography

Starry memoirs were served up, with deals inked for Sylvester Stallone’s The Steps, to be published in October this year, and Boris Becker’s Inside: Winning, Losing, Starting Again, about life during and after his prison sentence for hiding £2.5m in assets and loans.