Photo by Susan Q Yin on Unsplash

From the moment I was born I have been reading. According to my family I couldn’t be sated with just one reading of ‘The Tiger who Came to Tea’ or ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’, no, I had to hear the same story maybe five times in a row before I was satisfied. I asked to be read the same story so many times that my auntie started seeing caterpillars in her dreams. I’ve only realised how grateful I am to my family for reading to me every night when I attended The Bookseller’s Children’s conference. 

For my first publishing conference, I was hoping that I would be wowed by stats of how the industry was booming and young people were moving away from screens and back to books. I wasn’t expecting to be laden down with statistics about the growing number of children who were turning away from the magical, fictional worlds that I had been so taken with as a child. Not the most hopeful feeling at my first ever publishing conference, especially after making the jump from journalism which is currently under siege from AI.  I felt a little disheartened hearing the data from speakers Cally Poplak and Lizzie Catford who spoke about the throngs of children who are not read to due to busy guardians, closure of libraries and the prices of books in the face of a cost of living crisis. Or when Sofia Akel, shared her anecdote about a girl trying to read in a cafe only to be asked to leave because she hadn’t purchased anything. 

Behind the numbers and the market analysis there are real, harrowing facts that are dawning on us. It’s easy to give up, to let the apathy consume you. Since the pandemic, there’s been a steady rise of children falling out of love with reading or never picking it up in the first place, the closure of over 800 libraries since 2010 and the fall of reading levels in children post-pandemic. I fell victim to the fear mongering, that my dreams to be even a part-time writer were going to be crushed under the boot of austerity and the shrinking prosperity of the UK art’s industry.

 Pessimism is easy, I have found, because there’s no work required in throwing up your hands and saying ‘well we tried!’ Optimism takes work – optimism is the visionaries behind Illumicrate and Woke Babies, the former delivers the joy of reading to children who might not have the chance otherwise and the latter lets black children see themselves in books that aren’t about social issues. Optimism is BookTrust’s mission to help raise literacy levels of both parents and children. Optimism is seeing a problem in the industry that you love so much and deciding that you are going to take charge and make a difference. 

The world of publishing is preserving through hardship and bringing together some of the greatest, most compassionate minds I’ve ever seen – I am so incredibly grateful to be joining this industry and I hope I can make a change in my own way. Long live ‘The Hungry Caterpillar’!

Title taken from excerpt of Jenny Holzer’s ‘Inflammatory Essays’ 1979-81.