Australian Reading Hour to end

Australia Reads will retire its annual Australian Reading Hour event in favour of ‘a practical, unified, and year-round approach to advocating for reading in Australia’.

In a statement, Australia Reads reflected on Australian Reading Hour, noting that the program ‘has engaged over a million Australians in reading, featured over 300 annual events, attracted mainstream media coverage, and made tens of thousands of books available to young people at affordable prices’.

However, in its pursuit of ‘a mission to build a stronger reading culture in Australia’, the organisation ‘decided it was time to take stock and evaluate Australian Reading Hour’s effectiveness in growing reading engagement in Australia’, noting that it had heard a message from supporters its mission would be better supported by a year-round approach.

Australia Reads said that this decision would enable the re-allocation of time and resources to advocacy at a national level, year-round campaigning to increase reading participation, and other initiatives to support reading promotion through resources and research.

The Reading Hour event, in its earlier format run by the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA), was first held in 2012. In 2017, the inaugural Australian Reading Hour became an extension of the ALIA Reading Hour event, becoming a cross-industry campaign, supported by ALIA alongside the Australian Society of Authors (ASA), the Australian Publishers Association (APA), the Australian Booksellers Association (ABA), and the Copyright Agency.

Australia Reads then began in 2020, at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic, when the Australian Reading Hour event rebranded and expanded, seeking to reach both younger and older readers. Then, in 2021, Australia Reads became an ‘always on’ campaign, extending its scope beyond the Australian Reading Hour event.

The 2023 Australian Reading Hour event, held on 9 March, involved over 250 events, including a live digital storytelling event viewed by over 17,000 students. Later in 2023, Australia Reads hosted the Volume symposium, exploring issues affecting reading engagement in Australia.

The organisation is also planning to soon release a report on its research into live literature events in Australia.

Category: Local news