(Photo provided to China Daily)
Chinese books such as Keywords to Understand China by New World Press were also launched at the fair.
Besides Yu and Lu, the Confucius Institute got writers such as Liu Cixin, Yan Lianke, poet Wang Xiaoni and illustrator Xiong Liang to go to Frankfurt.
Liu Cixin's Three-Body Problem that sold 160,000 copies in English since being printed will be released in German soon. It is the first book of his famous trilogy to be published in the language.
Liu told his audience at the fair that he was seeking connections between the infinite universe and people. In true form, he went: "If we invite all human beings to a concert, the Pudong area in Shanghai would be enough to contain them; and if we turned all humans into a meat ball, the diameter of the ball would be no longer than nine kilometers.
"What I'm doing is offering fantasies," he added.
The Confucius Institute also held an exhibition on children's picture books from China at the fair.
Jing Wei, its deputy chief executive, while introducing the exhibition said: "We have such a diversity of picture books in China. They tell the audience about how we cope with nature, and where we are from and are going (to)."
Russian publisher Maxim Lozovskiy with Eksmo AST Publishing, whose task at the fair was to follow the latest trends in global publishing, found the speeches by two representatives from China's publishing industry interesting. One was by Gong Shuguang, chairman of Hunan Publishing Investment Holding Group, and the other by Ma Minghui from the Educational Science Publishing House.
Ma was among six "young talents" at this year's Frankfurt fair.
Gong said Chinese publishers shouldn't be content with the huge domestic book market. And to show effort in that direction, the China International Publishing Group held a seminar on the fair, where it invited experts from Europe to give advice on their published titles that are aimed at the global market.
According to Susanne Barwick, who is with the German Publishers & Booksellers Association, Germany has a book market worth 9.2 billion euros ($10.01 billion), while China has one of 18 billion euros.
"China is the country that buys the most copyrights of German titles," Barwick said, adding that Germany buys most from English-speaking countries, followed by France and Japan.
Renate Reichstein, a former president of the Association of German Children's Book Publishers, agreed there's a huge gap between Chinese reading German books and vice versa.
Around 25 percent of the new titles published in Germany are translated, and China may rank between 20 and 25 in German copyright intakes. Further, up to 0.3 percent of its overall new titles originate in China.
"German publishers and readers should look east," Reichstein says of Chinese children's books.
German publisher Reclam's release of a full translation of Journey to the West by Eva Ludi Kong at the fair showed the continued interest in Chinese classics.
Though this year the Chinese presence was larger than the previous two or three, the fair's organizers like vice-president Holger Volland said he hoped to see more Chinese writers in the future.
