Leipzig Reads

Leipzig liest, or Leipzig Reads, is a citywide reading festival that runs alongside the Leipzig Book Fair each spring, distributing several thousand author readings and events across bookshops, cafes and cultural venues throughout the city rather than concentrating them at the fairground. Built on Leipzig's book-trade history, which briefly overtook Frankfurt's as Germany's largest in 1632, the festival has run for roughly thirty years and is widely regarded as Europe's largest reading festival.

Leipzig's publishing history reaches back to the fifteenth century, and by 1632 its book fair had already overtaken Frankfurt's to become the largest in Germany, a lead it held until the political division of Germany after 1945 shifted the country's main publishing centre of gravity back to Frankfurt in the West.