Speakers 2026

Bernardo P. Carvalho (Lisbon, 1973) is a children’s book illustrator and co-founder of the publishing house Planeta Tangerina. He studied Communication Design at FBAUL and Drawing at the National Society of Fine Arts. He has received the Portuguese National Illustration Award, the Gustav Heinemann Peace Prize (Germany), and has been honored twice at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair.

Paloma is an illustrator, publisher and author of children’s books. She studied design and went on to complete postgraduate studies in Creative Illustration, as well as in Anthropology and Audiovisual Communication.
She has over 30 published titles, translated into 20 languages.
She has been awarded the Grand Prix at the Bratislava Biennial and was shortlisted for the Hans Christian Andersen Award and the ALMA Award.
She is the editor of Ediciones Libre, a publisher specialising in early childhood literature, which was nominated for the BOP award for Best Publisher at the Bologna Book Fair between 2023 and 2026.
She is passionate about books, illustrations and the defence of childhood as a sacred space.
 

Iván Mayorquín and Raúl Pardo are two Mexican illustrators with over a decade of professional experience. Their expertise spans illustration, product development, graphic storytelling, information design and print work. The Drawing Self-Help Group is their podcast and platform designed to help creative people navigate these waters more effectively and with good company.
They are also founding members of Pictoline, where they were involved in creative direction, art direction, innovation and illustration.
 

Ilaria Tontardini teaches the History of Illustration at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. Since 2005, she has been a member of the Hamelin Cultural Association, where she works as a curator and develops projects related to comics and illustration, such as organizing exhibitions for the Bologna Children’s Book Fair programme and editing Obló, a magazine featuring monographs on illustrators from around the world. She is also one of the organizers of the BilBOlbul comics festival.

She was born in Lima, Peru. Her picture books have been 
translated into 20 languages, and some of them have been reprinted 25 times to date. Her work has been exhibited internationally in cities such as New York, Berlin, Rome, Taiwan, Tokyo, Washington, Madrid, Frankfurt and Vienna, amongst others. 
As an author, she has won some of the most prestigious awards in children’s and young adult literature, such as the Bologna Regazzi Awards 2024; the Grand Prix Sorcières 2020, Libreter 2020, the Grand Jury Prize at the BIBF Ananas International Illustration Exhibition 2021, Zlata Hruska 2021, A la Orilla del Viento, The White Ravens 2020 and 2024,
DPictus 2020 and 2024, amongst others.
 

La Pera Ediciones is a creative studio founded by 
Paula García and Bernardo Merino, specialising in small-scale, handmade print productions. It produces both its own publications and collaborative publishing projects, acting as a platform for independent book publishing.
La Pera Ediciones’ work focuses on visual research, the exploration of the material and formal boundaries of publishing, and manual processes.
La Pera Ediciones was born out of a shared interest in self-publishing, fanzines and books as objects, viewing each publication as a carefully crafted and unique piece.
 

Leonard S. Marcus is one of the world’s leading writers about children’s books and the people who create them. He is the author of Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon, Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom, Golden Legacy: The Story of Golden Books, and more than 20 other books, including most recently You Can't Say That!: Writers for Young People Talk about Censorship, Free Expression, and the Stories They Have to Tell. Leonard has written frequently for the New York Times Book Review and has been a commentator on radio and television. He is a founding trustee of the Eric Carle Museum and is Editor at Large at Astra Publishing House, where he publishes picture books and poetry collections for young readers from around the world. Leonard lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Libri Finti Clandestini is a cosmopolitan collective that bases its work and research on artist’s books. Researching paper materials in old archives, paper mills and labs and exploring abandoned factories using cameras, telephones and portable scanners, in order to catalog the material found for future projects, its aim is to create books (individually bound by hand, stamped and numbered), ready to be used and drawn in (sketchbook and notebooks), pop up books in a small editions (50, 100 copies), fanzines and unique copies collaborations with artists, always under the sign of “experimentation”.