The next BookFest will be coming to Chichester schools on 8th to 10th October 2024, and will involve 26 schools and around 3500 children. We’re so excited that they get to meet real-life authors, illustrators and poets, including the most marvellous Maz Evans, author of the Who Let the Gods Out? Series, and the current Waterstones Children’s Laureate the Legendary Joseph Coelho OBE. And we’re even more excited that they’ll each get their very own, personally dedicated, book.

Raising the funds to buy so many books for so many children is never easy, but it’s worth all the hard work when we hear how much of a difference it makes! The children clutch and smell their book, ask if it really is theirs to keep, read it as they walk out of school at home time and talk about it for weeks afterwards. The gift of your own book really supports the consistent messaging from these brilliant schools that reading is about so much more than education. All the research shows that Reading for Pleasure has powerful and long-lasting benefits for children across the whole of their lives, so we believe that book ownership should be a right, not a privilege.