For anyone who hasn’t read widely on my blog, a quick heads up – I love books.
I can see the rest of you shaking heads with a no, really? kind of look 😉
I also love sharing books with my children. (That wasn’t news either was it?)
As well as all of that, I love meeting authors. Long before I had children or a blog, I lived in Sheffield, and worked near a big branch of Waterstones. They regularly had author events on an evening – I would work late, grab something to eat at my desk and then go and sit and listen to an author reading from their work, taking questions from the crowd, and then signing books for people there. I met Terry Pratchett. Deric Longden. Many more who embarrassingly I now can’t remember, and as there was no social media, I can’t look up in my archives.
More recently I’ve been lucky enough to meet all sorts of authors, some of whom I spend lots of time chatting with online. Most recently I took Big to meet Teri Terry at the launch of her third book – a lovely evening out for both of us.
Meeting authors can really bring books to life, giving them an extra dimension. I love it when children get the chance to meet an author hero. And that’s why I think what the Scottish Booktrust are doing is so absolutely excellent.
The Scottish Friendly Children’s Book Tour takes authors into schools all around the country, for free. Children get the chance to meet people like Julia Donaldson, Marcus Sedgwick and the current Children’s Laureate, Malorie Blackman (on tour in Scotland this month!) They are still taking booking for events later this year, so you might want to point that out to your friendly local librarian or teacher, and they don’t cover only Scotland, there’s a tour listed on the site for Brighton and Hove for author Chae Strathie, as well as Nicola Davies touring Argyll and Bute.
From the look of the Booktrust site, a lot of children have had a great time being involved in the tours in the past. I particularly like the Philip Ardagh pic of lots of children with beards 😉 It’s also worth exploring to see the author resources that are available for download, there’s lots on there.
All in all this seems to me to be an excellent initiative, and I’m very pleased to have been asked to write about it.
Disclosure: this is a sponsored post.