Carolina Ballester

Carolina Ballester was born in Paris and studied in Spain and France, obtaining an MA in Political Science from the Madrid Complutense University and degrees in Chinese and Arabic from the French National Institute of Oriental Studies (Langues’O). She worked as a translator and served as cultural attaché at the Consulate of Spain in Shanghai from 2011 to 2013.
In 2013, she joined the Shanghai International Children’s Book Fair as international programme manager and for ten years she curated a range of conferences, competitions and fellowship programmes to foster business and knowledge exchange between children’s book publishers and creators from China and beyond.
Carolina joined the International Board on Books for Young people (IBBY) as Executive Director in September 2022, bringing to IBBY an interest and wide knowledge in children’s literature and illustration, as well as international experience and fluency in several languages, including French, Spanish, English and Mandarin.