UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay announced Tbilisi, Georgia as the UNESCO World Book Capital 2021 on October 7, 2019.
The World Book Capital is the city that UNESCO designates to be the headquarters of activities for World Book and Copyright Day on April 23. This date is the anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, as well as that of the birth or death of several other prominent authors. Previous cities to host the event have been Madrid (2001), Alexandria (2002), New Delhi (2003), Anvers (2004), Montreal (2005), Turin (2006), Bogota (2007), Amsterdam(2008), Beirut (2009), Ljubljana (2010), Buenos Aires (2011), Erevan (2012), Bangkok (2013), Port Harcourt (2014), Incheon (2015), Wroclaw (2016), Conakry (2017), Athens (2018), and Sharjah (2019). The designated city for 2020 is Kuala Lumpur.
The announcement for Tbilisi, Georgia as World Book Capital for the year 2021 by UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay was based on the recommendation of the World Book Capital Advisory Committee, which met in Switzerland in June 2019.
The program for 2021 will comprise of several important, large-scale and sustainable activities. Amongst the events and activities, there will be libraries and a book festival for children, a state-of-the-art digital project for transforming books into games, and the rebuilding of the first Georgian publishing house.
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