Porto's New Babell Festival Brings Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, and a Nobel Laureate to the City — Your Ticket Is a Book

Porto will host its first major international literary festival from 24 to 30 June, with a headline programme that includes Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Nobel Prize-winning Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk, and German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han.

Babell — Cidade-Livro was officially presented at Livraria Lello, the ornate nineteenth-century bookshop that has become one of Porto's most photographed landmarks, in the presence of Mayor Pedro Duarte and festival commissioner Rui Couceiro.

Buy a Book, Get a Seat

The festival's most distinctive feature is its ticketing model. There are no conventional tickets. Instead, attendees must purchase a book from any of approximately seventy participating bookshops and antiquarian booksellers across the city. The purchase generates a code that reserves a seat at scheduled events.

Passersby and tourists can stand and watch sessions for free, but seated access requires the book purchase — a mechanism Couceiro says could "revolutionise the publishing and bookstore sectors" and be "replicated worldwide."

The model serves a dual purpose: it drives foot traffic to Porto's independent bookshops, many of which have struggled against online retail, while ensuring that festival audiences are readers rather than casual spectators.

Literature in the Streets

Rather than confining programming to a single venue, Babell will occupy Porto's public spaces — streets, squares, and cultural institutions across the city. The main stage will be at Praça Gomes Fernandes, also known as Praça dos Leões, in the heart of the university quarter.

The programme spans conversations with authors, academic colloquia, exhibitions, performances, and concerts. The international headliners will appear during the weekend of 27 and 28 June, while earlier days in the week will feature Portuguese-language authors and emerging voices.

Why Porto, Why Now

Porto has been positioning itself as a literary city for years. Livraria Lello draws more than a million visitors annually, and the city's university culture, historic printing houses, and cafe traditions give it a natural claim to the role.

The festival also arrives at a moment when Portugal's cultural sector is attracting increased public investment. The government has signalled its intention to use culture as a driver of inland and off-season tourism, and a major international literary event in Porto — rather than Lisbon — fits that strategic direction.

For the city's booksellers, the promise is simple: a week in which seventy shops become box offices, and every reader becomes a patron. Whether the model proves sustainable beyond the inaugural edition will depend on attendance figures and the willingness of publishers to co-invest.

Tickets — or rather, books — go on sale through participating stores in May. The full programme is expected to be announced in the coming weeks.