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Welcome to World Book Night 2024 from The Reading Agency

Tonight is for everyone who reads – a lot or a little, every day or every month – to celebrate books and how they make a difference to life.

I remember many years ago – just after the invention of printing – marking WBN by trooping round my local town, with a bag full of paperbacks, trying to interest people in reading Good Omens by Terry Prachett & Neil Gaiman. I hope everyone who took a copy read it.

The aim today is to read a book between 7-8pm and share it using #ReadingHour and #WorldBookNight. You can talk to someone about it, or share a book with friends. Maybe buy a book from Bookshop.org who support local and independent booksellers with enormouse success, generating £3,506,613 in sales.

There’s loads of resources and a list of the Quick Reads on the World Book Night site. Celebrate reading!

One of the tings I enjoy about the LBF is visiting stands from many of the European countries – Bulgaria, Poland, Estonia, etc. Aside from a great selection of titles in their own language, there’s also lots of fascinating material in translation, particularly collections of stories and literary magazines. The collections of illustrations for children’s books is my favourite.

My first stop is always The Polish Book Institute stand – not because I speak a word of their language – but because they come armed every year with apples! Not like the grape-sized wonders we get locally, but real mammoth versions (see picture). They had some wonderful books for all ages including beautifully bound (and expensive) classics.

Twenty four Polish exhibitors were represented through their New Books from Poland 2023 and Polish Books from Children & Young Adults 2023 catalogues. They were also celebrating the 100th anniversary of Wladyslaw Reymont’s winner of the 1924 Nobel Prize for Literature. Best known for his award-winning four-volume novel The Peasants.

The longlist of nominations for this year’s International Booker Prize – the most prestigious award given to authors of the best English-language books – includes a collection from Polish writer Urszula Honek. Her short stories White Nights, translated by Kate Webster, was promoted at LBF in 2022. The final 13 were selected from among 149 books written in 32 languages. White Nights is a series of thirteen interconnected stories concerning the various tragedies and misfortunes that befall a group of people who all grew up and live(d) in the same village in the Beskid Niski region, in southern Poland.

Some years ago I reported on the plight of small publishing houses who were finding it tough, gruelling, even – none more so than the wonderful Holland Park Press. The company publishes literary fiction and poetry, with special emphasis on bringing the work of Dutch authors to the English language market.

As I reported: the desire to keep publishing placed a heavy toll on them. Now, years later, Holland Park are still in there fighting. Check out their site. The books are not expensive and, who knows, might introduce you to a whole new world of fiction in translation. It would be a tragedy to lose them.

Just for the record I have no links with HPP. I just love their spirit and their books!