Grace Heriegel

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I’m so grateful to share my two day volunteering experience at The London Book Fair 2026!!!

Day one was filled with lots of exploring, finding stands as well as AMAZING campaigns such as ‘Don’t Steal This Book’ – more information here: https://www.dontstealthisbook.com/ – and meeting incredible people such as Alice Oseman talking about Heartstopper 6 as well as her intense but majorly successful pitch meeting with Netflix, and an amazing talk on Manga chaired by Nigel Twumasi – which is a FORM of media, not a genre…

It was slightly overwhelming being a volunteer and having to direct people to different places when you were new to the building yourself! So to anybody who met me in the first hour or so of me being ‘here to help’ – I do apologise!!

Day two consisted of attending MANY talks, with the inspirational author Mike Gayle and events hosted by English PEN who are a vital company in our publishing industry today, honing in on diversity and finding joy in authoritarianism.

English PEN is such an incredible organisation that I can’t believe I didn’t hear about until their events. You can follow the link to their website here: https://www.englishpen.org/ to either join them on their journey to pure freedom of expression for all authors and publishers alike, or even just to inform yourself about where there are issues in this industry and what you can do to help. Plus, after meeting the team at LBF they are such lovely people who really deserve all the help they can get!

Overall, I had an incredible two days meeting some amazing people and finding out so much more about the publishing industry – looking forward to hopefully attending next year, and many more years to come!!!