FIL Niños is the cultural pavilion of the Guadalajara International Book Fair dedicated to children and family audiences. Consolidating its position as one of the most important cultural spaces for children in Ibero-America. Since its creation, FIL Niños has fostered encounters between literature, art, and imagination as living experiences. In a four-thousand-square-meter space, the pavilion brings together workshops that promote storytelling and creative writing, an international performing arts forum, a reading room, and an exhibition area specialized in children´s literature. More than a venue for activities, FIL Niños is a place where literature is discovered as an aesthetic experience, play, thought, and wonder.
With an international performing arts program that brings together theater, music, puppetry, clowning, multimedia, and dance, the FIL Niños Forum presents productions conceived especially for children and family audiences. Each performance expands the reading experience by bringing imagination and storytelling to the stage, turning the performing arts into a gateway to stories.
The FIL Niños program is structured around two complementary experiences: workshops designed by FIL Niños and creative exchanges with invited authors and illustrators.
FIL Niños workshops, created from books and literary references, are led by artists and mediators from different disciplines. Through play, exploration, and creation, children aged 0 to 12 discover reading as a living experience that can be expressed through writing, art, music, theater, or observation of their surroundings.
Within the Spontaneous Workshops program, creative exchanges allow young audiences to engage directly with national and international creators, who share their stories, processes, and imaginaries in participatory sessions that bring contemporary literature and illustration closer to children.
Together, these experiences make FIL Niños a space where reading, creating, and meeting the people behind books are part of the same adventure.
FIL Niños features an exhibition and sales area for children´s books, with participation from national and international publishers. This space allows children to discover, choose, and take books home, strengthening the bond between the cultural experience and everyday reading.
Pavilion sponsors also take part in this area with activities that complement the public´s visit.
The Reading Room is a pause space within the pavilion. There, children and accompanying adults can read together, rest, and share stories before or after participating in workshops and performances.
It is a place to inhabit books calmly amid the intensity of the Fair.
The Calm Cabin is a rest and sensory regulation space within FIL Niños, designed for children who need a pause during their visit to the pavilion. This area offers a quiet environment with controlled stimuli and respectful accompaniment, allowing visitors to regain calm before continuing their experience at the Fair.
As part of FIL Niños´ commitment to inclusion and children´s well-being, the Calm Cabin seeks to ensure that everyone can enjoy the pavilion at their own pace.
On April 23rd, the Guadalajara International Book Fair celebrated World Book and Copyright Day, an important date to promote the enjoyment of books and reading. Hundreds of readers lent their voices to read aloud the work Los recuerdos del porvenir, by the writer Elena Garro.
As part of the celebration, FIL Kids created an experience inspired by the narrative voice of this work that was fundamental for magical realism. A route from Ixtepec (Elena Garro); Casa Tomada (Julio Cortázar); Comala (Juan Rulfo); Cuévano (Jorge Ibargüengoitia); Macondo (Gabriel García Márquez), The house of the Spirits (Isabel Allende), to Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (Jorge Luis Borges). The attendees toured this literary map where each place told them its own story. Encouraged by the soundscape, those who ventured to follow the route and listen, used typewriters or colored pencils to leave testimony of their own imaginary lands.
Discover the transformative power of the word through the body and sound. The project “Slam! Sound Poetry” started in 2019. For several weeks in workshop sessions the children experienced the poetic language of words and transmitted it with their voice and body.
The Subversive Printing Press is a mobile unit, equipped with a printing press, where children created subversive posters based on ten basic postulates of the book La ANARQUIA explicada a los niños (Anarchy explained to children) by José Antonio Emmanuel. Through a series of self-directed workshops, the children experimented with printing machines, with language and the construction of messages that express their desires and propose forms of coexistence free of violence in their community.
Coordination Ana Luelmo
Editorial Universitaria de Guadalajara
The questions that are presented here are a call to find out a little more than what is already known, to keep alive the ability to wonder and keep asking. But more than the answers, the questions that can be generated page after page matter, the more playful the better, because the path to knowledge is absolutely fun. This book is an interactive machine that works as a trigger for more questions, and seeks to promote the formulation of questions as a fun path to knowledge. Its reading is designed so that, in a playful way, children and adults can satisfy their curiosity and exercise their capacity for wonder together.
For more information contact:
Ana Luelmo, Children´s pavilion manager, by phone (+52) 33 3268 0934
For more information contact:
Sharon Ramírez, Children´s Workshop Manager, by phone (+52) 33 3268 0934
