Tag Archives: book launch

*Give away* The Gifts of Reading for the Next Generation

September 18, 2025 By in Events, Post-world Tags: , , , , , 5 Comments

Many of those I interact with about books through this project, both virtually and at my Incomprehension Workshops, are young people. Even now, all these years after I set out to read the world, I sometimes find my inbox flooded with messages from students whose teacher has asked them to write to me recommending a story. A while ago, I received a wonderful video from a young boy in Beijing advising me to read a book that explained why tomatoes can sometimes be quite dangerous.

Statistics bear out the enthusiasm for reading internationally that I’ve seen among the young: according to data compiled by Nielsen for the Booker Prize Foundation, ‘book buyers under the age of 35 account for almost half (48.2%) of all translated fiction purchases in the UK‘.

So it was a delight to be invited to contribute an essay to a new collection celebrating the importance and joy of reading for children and young people. The Gifts of Reading for the Next Generation is the second such anthology put together by editor Jennie Orchard. Like the first volume, The Gifts of Reading, it was inspired by an essay by the UK nature writer and scholar Robert Macfarlane, who wrote the foreword to this new collection.

Other contributors include such household names as William Boyd, Michael Morpurgo, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, Imtiaz Dharker and Horatio Clare, and all royalties go to Room to Read and U-Go. Founded by John Wood, these organisations promote literacy and education for girls and women. Indeed, U-Go’s aim is to fund the university education of 100,000 young women in the world’s lowest income countries.

We celebrated the UK publication of The Gifts of Reading for the Next Generation with a launch at London’s Daunt Bookshop. Also published in the US and Australia, the collection is widely available.

BUT I have one copy that I am happy to sign and send anywhere in the world. If you’d like it, simply message me or leave a comment below telling me about a book you gave or received that was important to you.

Looking forward to hearing your stories!

Photos © Amber Melody

A night to remember

February 5, 2015 By in Events, Post-world, Reading the World (book) Tags: , , , , , , 23 Comments

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So the day is finally here. Reading the World: Confessions of a Literary Explorer is published and on sale through all major e-tailers and retailers, as well as some fantastic independent bookshops too. We did it!

Last night I celebrated the event with friends, family, colleagues, fellow book lovers and some of the many people who helped the project on its way at the Free Word Centre in Farringdon. You can see me speaking in the photo above, which was taken by the writer Martin Goodman – one of a number of a number of authors who were there, including Hamid Ismailov, whose book The Railway was my pick for Uzbekistan. I’m not quite sure what I was saying at this point, but it was probably some kind of thank you (there were a lot of those).

It was a joy to see so many people who were important to me and to the project in the same room, but I was particularly delighted by the fact that four of the volunteers who translated a book for me to read from São Tomé and Príncipe were there. You can see us together in the picture below (from left: Clare Keats, Margaret Jull Costa, me, Yema Ferreira and Robin Patterson). It was the first time I had met three of them in person, so it was a very special moment.

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I was also really pleased to be able to reflect the international theme of the book in other ways. It was wonderful that the team from Belgravia Books (the home of French-literature-in-translation publisher Gallic Books) were there to sell copies of Reading the World. I signed a couple for them to take back to the shop, so if you’re passing through Victoria in the next few days you might be able to pick one up if you pop in.

And when it came to the drinks, we had wine from four different countries – Slovenia, Romania, Uruguay and Greece – which was provided by The Wine Pack (@thewinepack if you want to get their tips on Twitter). They’d even made bookmarks with tasting notes and details of which book I’d read from each nation represented.

There were so many wonderful things about the party. I could write for ages about the pleasure of introducing people who I knew shared common interests, reading my work aloud and seeing old friends.

Unfortunately, however, I’ve got to dash. I’m about to head off into town again – this time to BBC Broadcasting House to record a discussion about Reading the World and translation for Radio Four’s show Open Book. Wish me luck!

Pictures by Martin Goodman and Steve Lennon

Ready for launch

February 4, 2015 By in Post-world, Reading the World (book) Tags: , , , , , , , 39 Comments

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My dress is pressed. The wine is on its way. In a few hours’ time, I’ll be taking those shrink-wrapped copies of Reading the World in the picture above to central London to join a mountain of others at the launch before my book goes on sale tomorrow and I become a published author.

I’m excited to see my friends, family and many of the people who helped make the book happen. I’m eager to hear my editor speak about the project. And I’m looking forward to getting up on stage to read an extract out loud.

But for now, sitting in the peace and quiet of the living room where this journey started just over three years ago, I’m taking a moment to reflect on this project and where it has led. I’m thinking of the people around the planet who shared their knowledge and experience with me, the supporters who cheered me on, and the amazing stories we found together.

Human beings and books are capable of extraordinary things.

A new title hits the shelves

March 17, 2014 By in Europe, Post-world, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 8 Comments

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One of the exciting things about reading the world was the number of unpublished manuscripts I got to sample during the project. From the crowd-sourced translation of Olinda Beja’s A casa do pastor, which I read for Sao Tome & Principe after nine volunteers generously converted it into English for me, and Mozambican literary giant Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa’s Ualalapi, to Ak Welsapar’s The Tale of Aypi  – the first book ever to be translated directly from Turkmen but still, sadly, without an Anglophone publishing deal – I was repeatedly surprised and delighted by the extraordinary works I had the privilege of discovering.

People often ask me whether any of these works are going to make it into the shops. I hope so, is the short answer. Certainly many of them deserve to – not least because they are often one of the few, if not the only, English-language translations of literature in existence from particular nations. I would be delighted if this project meant that some of these exciting stories had a chance to break into the world’s largest publishing market.

So you can imagine my pleasure when I heard today that Robi Gottlieb-Cahen’s Minute Stories has come out through Editions Phi.

Now, I have  to confess that A Year of Reading the World has nothing to with Gottlieb-Cahen’s success – the book was already slated for publication when Claudine Muno, frontwoman of Luxembourgian band Claudine Muno and the Lunar Boots, helped me find it. Still, it’s great to hear of the first AYORTW manuscript making it into print – particularly from Luxembourg, which has very little literature available in English.

Gottlieb-Cahen’s fascinating collection of tiny stories of no more than two or three sentences written in three languages and accompanying paintings by the author will give many readers a chance to sample literature from a nation they might not otherwise have the opportunity to read a book from. Congratulations on your achievement, Robi!

And for details of more AYORTW titles coming to bookshops or e-retailers near you, watch this space…

Picture from Editions Phi