Gaudeamus Radio Romania 32
Bucharest is hosting the Gaudeamus Book Fair
Bogdan Matei, 03.12.2025, 13:50
From Wednesday to Sunday, Romania’s capital Bucharest is hosting the Gaudeamus Book Fair, organized by Radio Romania. It is an event with a solid tradition, now in its 32nd edition in 36 years of post-communist Romania. The cultural press calls it a true literary feast, with over 180 participants this year, offering readers over 600 publishing events. According to a press release issued by the organizers, all the prestigious publishing houses in Romania are represented, as well as Romanian and foreign book distribution agencies, university publishing houses and higher education institutions, as well as music distributors. The full program of events, designed to be flexible and constantly updated, is available on the website www.gaudeamus.ro.
As in previous editions, one of the event spaces set up within the fair, named Ion Creangă – a 19th-century classic of children’s literature – will be dedicated mainly to the youngest visitors. Top-notch guests: Olimpicii României (Romania’s Olympians) is a project through which Radio Romania and its partners reward and promote students who achieve exceptional results in international competitions in various disciplines. The prizes, worth over 40,000 lei (equivalent to approximately 8,000 euros), will be offered by Cosmo Pharm, a traditional sponsor of the fair.
The Gaudeamus trophies, awarded since 1997, will be presented at the end of this edition to three of the participating publishers and to the ‘Most Coveted Book of the Fair’, as determined by public vote. The honorary president of this edition is journalist, writer, and foreign policy analyst Sabina Fati, a consistent promoter of Western values in the Romanian public sphere. She believes that the problem in Romania at the moment is that the book market is in decline, not only because of the economic crisis we are all going through, but also because the book market has been directly hit by the increase in the value added tax from 5% to 11% as of August 1.
The Bucharest 2025 edition of the Fair concludes this year, as per tradition, the series of exhibition events dedicated to books and education organized by the public radio station in Craiova, Cluj-Napoca, Oradea, Buzău, Braşov, Sibiu, and Iaşi, cities that hosted the Gaudeamus Radio Romania Caravan. The event is organized by the Romanian Broadcasting Corporation, the only radio station in the world which, according to the organizers, ‘has taken on the mission of contributing to the information and education of the public through an event of this magnitude’. The Gaudeamus Fair is a cultural project funded by the Romanian Ministry of Culture and, for several editions in a row, has operated under the slogan ‘the largest book fair from the most listened to radio station’. (MI)
