This year’s Taipei International Book Exhibition will run from Wednesday February 11 to Monday February 16. The Golden Butterfly Awards and TIBE Prizes will be announced before the expo gets underway.

The Golden Butterfly Awards are a major book layout and design prize organized by the Ministry of Culture and administered by the Taipei Book Fair Foundation, which this year also received assistance from the National Taiwan Normal University Library, the NTNU Department of Design, and Tien Tien Circle Creatives. Taiwanese judges made the initial selections, then handed the nominees over to an international panel for evaluation. TIBE attracted greater global attention to this year’s award by inviting renowned book designers Jonas Voegeli and Liu Xiao­xiang to aid in the judging. Both Voegeli and Liu have won Leipzig’s “Best Book Design from All Over the World” competition three times.

Last year’s Golden Butterfly gold medal went to 1980 Nian­dai de Ai­qing (“A 1980s Love”), designed by Ho Chia-­hsing and published by Homeward Publishing. Silver and bronze went to two books designed by Peng ­Hsing-kai: In Vishnu’s Dream (Ink Publishing) and Nagging: Conceptual Poetry in Poster and Photo Bessatsu (Black Issue Publishing). There will be 30 prizes in 2015, including one gold, one silver, one bronze, and 27 honorable mentions. The awards ceremony will be held in the Blue Salon during the exhibition and the winners flown to Leipzig for the “Best Book Design from All Over the World” competition.

The TIBE Book Prize marked its eighth year in 2015. The winners were announced on January 14, and for the first time included writers from Hong Kong and mainland China. With this step, the prize has moved beyond its earlier focus on Taiwanese, and become an honor open to Chinese-language authors the world over. The organizers hope that the award will eventually become one of Asia’s top Chinese-language literary prizes.

TIBE awards three prizes each in the fiction and non-fiction categories. Chan Ho-kei, the first Hong Kong author to receive a TIBE Prize, earned a fiction prize for 13•67. Two Taiwanese authors, Luo Yi­jun (Daughter) and Lin Chun-ying (A Certain Someone’s Dream), won the other two fiction prizes. The non-fiction prizes went to Liu Ka-­shaing (Three-Quarters of Hong Kong), Ku Yu-ling (Going Home), and ­mainland Chinese documentary film maker Zhang ­Zanbo (The Big Road: A Low-Speed Life in High-Speed China). The awards ceremony, scheduled for February 11, will kick off this year’s exhibition. TIBE will also exhibit this year’s finalists during the expo, in an effort to introduce them to a larger audience.

TIBE also seeks to broaden readers’ perspective on the larger literary world by annually selecting a nation as guest of honor. Over the years, these have included mainland China, Japan, Korea, Thailand, Bhutan, Singapore, Germany, the UK, France, the Czech Republic, Greece, Poland, Russia, Belgium, and Australia. New Zealand, this year’s guest of honor, is only the second nation from the Southern Hemisphere to have been chosen.

Though New Zealand, known as the cleanest nation on Earth, is relatively small and has a population of just 4.5 million, its rich indigenous culture and abundance of skilled writers and filmmakers earned it the guest of honor slot at the 2012 Frankfurt Book Fair. Its selection as TIBE’s 2015 guest of honor reflects the nation’s importance to Taiwan in the Asian reading market.

New Zealand plans to bring 17 publishers exhibiting the full range of the nation’s printed works to this year’s TIBE. Home to a world-class educational system, it will include several educational publishers among its delegation. It will also exhibit a number of education-related books and textbooks and share its experience in the field by hosting a roundtable on educational publishing.

TIBE invited architect Andrew Patterson, a winner of the World Architecture News Award, and his team to design this year’s guest of honor pavilion. This follows Patterson’s wonderful work designing New Zealand’s pavilion at the 2012 Frankfurt Book Fair. For TIBE, he used New Zealand’s indigenous culture as a foundation, and integrated a variety of cultural symbols to convey, within the limited space of the pavilion, the rich thought and potent imagery of the country’s publishing industry.

Organizers also invited the Maori dance troupe Ngā Kete Tuku Iho to perform, to demonstrate the beauty of New Zealand in motion. Dance is one of the easiest and liveliest ways to experience Maori culture. By relating traditional stories through narrative dances, Ngā Kete Tuku Iho offers audiences a fascinating primer on New Zealand’s traditional culture.

In an excellent example of TIBE’s mandate to transcend national, linguistic and professional boundaries, the special effects team behind the The Lord of the Rings films will offer a presentation on its creation of Middle Earth, providing its Taiwanese counterparts with an opportunity to learn and establish ties that could lead to future cooperation. The presentation will also provide the readers in attendance at the usually staid publishing expo with a visual and tactile feast.

The finalists for the 2015 TIBE Prizes exemplify the vibrancy and creativity of Taiwan’s publishing industry.

Reading is great at any age, but starting early is generally better. In an effort to encourage reading among young children and teens, and make reading a habit among Taiwanese of all ages, TIBE is offering free admission to everyone under 18 years of age and giving half-price admission to anyone with a student ID. The only other international book fairs that currently offer similar discounts are the Paris Book Festival and the Buenos Aires Children’s Book Fair. TIBE’s move not only places it at the forefront of Asian book festivals, but will also enable underprivileged children to attend the exhibition, and help cultivate an interest in reading among the young.

TIBE has at times been derided as an annual exercise in inventory clearing and an obligatory exercise for publishers. TIBE’s organizers have striven to overcome such views, and are hoping that their efforts will attract a new generation of readers to the show. This year’s exhibition will once again occupy Halls 1 and 3 of the Taipei World Trade Center, with Hall 1 hosting the international, general reading, digital publishing, animation and comics, and light novel areas, and Hall 3 housing the children’s book and stationery areas. To heighten TIBE’s appeal to teens, organizers have added areas for light novels, animation and comics, as well as associated merchandise, to the 2015 expo. And, in keeping with readers’ long-held expectations of the show, the Blue Salon and Yellow Salon this year will feature appearances by noted Chinese-language writers including Ha Jin, Wang Wen-­hsing and Luo Chi-­cheng, as well as lectures, readings, performances, educational presentations, DIY workshops, autograph sessions, and the launch of hundreds of new books. The confirmed events will include: an autograph session with DNAXCat illustrators, a press conference on bestselling author Peter Su’s new book, a performance by the Tai­pei Civic Symphony Orchestra, and a three-way discussion between Lin Wen-yi, Chou Fen-ling, and Shu Guo­zhi on their literary lives.

As part of TIBE’s ongoing effort to become an Asian clearinghouse for publishing industry information, the organizers continued to work with the Frankfurt Book Fair by holding a second Frankfurt Academy Training Program, tailored for the Asian market, at this year’s expo. This academy provides information on international trends in publishing, promotes the exchange of real-world publishing experience, and helps Taiwanese industry professionals build and expand their international networks. Such endeavors are making TIBE ever more truly an international event.

The design of the New Zealand pavilion was inspired by the tokotoko, a traditional Maori walking stick. The pavilion is modeled on three tokotoko. Its exterior has been laser-carved with Maori motifs, while the round interior serves as a space for activities including Maori dance performances, publishing-industry events, and author meet-ups.

The Taipei International Book Exhibition (TIBE) attracts some 500,000 visitors every year. More than just a publishing industry event, the show also allows readers and writers to meet and interact.