Open Books — Reading Festival for the Frankfurt Book Fair

Frankfurt's Major Reading Festival

Open Books is Frankfurt's major city reading festival, held annually parallel to the Frankfurt Book Fair, extending it with a public component. While the Book Fair is a trade event for publishers, booksellers, and the press, Open Books opens up the literary city to the general public. The organizer is the Frankfurt am Main Cultural Office, which has been curating a dedicated program of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and comics for years.

125 Readings and Panels – Free of Charge

A programmatic hallmark is the approximately 125 readings and panel discussions held over five days at multiple venues around the Römerberg. The spectacular detail: Admission is free, without registration, without tickets. Anyone wanting to be in the Römerhallen at 7 PM on October 6 can simply show up. This radically low-threshold accessibility distinguishes Open Books from many classic literature festivals and makes it a democratic complement to the highly professionalized Book Fair.

The Römerhallen as the Centerpiece

The main venue is the Römerhallen in Frankfurt's old town – a modern event complex directly at the Römer, Frankfurt's historic city hall. The halls offer multiple rooms for parallel events, enabling Open Books to run several programs simultaneously. In addition, there are other venues in the old town: the Historisches Museum (Historical Museum), the area around the Kaiserdom (Imperial Cathedral), individual bookstores, and cultural centers that open their spaces for the festival.

Genre Diversity

The program covers the entire literary spectrum:

• Fiction – Novels, short stories, German-language and translated works
• Non-fiction – Political non-fiction, popular science, biographies
• Poetry – A dedicated program focus, deliberately highlighting contemporary poetry
• Comics and Graphic Novels – A genre that Open Books embraced early on as an independent literary form
• International Literature – Readings in multiple languages, often with simultaneous translation
• Open Books Kids – Children's and young adult literature, traditionally held at the German National Library

Embedded in the Book Fair

Programmatically, Open Books follows the logic of the Book Fair: Many of the authors who are coming to Frankfurt for the fair anyway will read at Open Books in the evening. This means the festival achieves a level of internationality and topicality that standalone literature festivals can hardly offer. Nominees for the German Book Prize, Peace Prize laureates, international bestselling authors – they are all available during the Book Fair and form the backbone of the Open Books program.

Opening with the Blue Sofa

The symbolic start is traditionally the opening with the Blue Sofa, the ZDF literary format, where the nominees for the German Book Prize present their works. This opening runs simultaneously as a TV recording and a public event, filling the halls each year. The exact lineup for the 2026 opening will be announced by the Cultural Office and Hessischer Rundfunk in the weeks before the festival.

Frankfurt as a Literary Capital

During the Book Fair week in October, Frankfurt am Main becomes the world's literary capital – with hundreds of events across the city, from commercial publisher parties to small bookstore readings. Within this landscape, Open Books is the city-funded, democratically accessible format. It is the city's answer to the question of how a Book Fair week can also work for readers who do not have an industry pass.