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Bringing the joy of reading to adults across the UK

The RLF’s Reading Round is a reading group with a difference: a community-focused programme that centres the experience of reading, listening to, and discussing stories and poetry in a relaxed,
inclusive and supportive environment.

Since 2013 our Reading Round Fellows have hosted groups in a variety of settings including theatres, community centres, churches and arts venues. This year, to celebrate the National Year of Reading, we’re delighted to be collaborating with the National Literacy Trust to launch a range of new Reading Round initiatives in locations including libraries, NHS settings and hospices, and – for the first time in Reading Round’s history – prisons.

As Katharine McMahon, Director, Workplace and Community for the RLF says:

As adults we often forget the sheer joy of reading stories and poems aloud and talking about them with other people. For a dozen years, Reading Round has connected people across the country through cultivating a pleasure in great literature – and in this National Year of Reading, I’m delighted that the RLF is committed to training and supporting writers to share the fairy dust with adults in ever more diverse communities and settings.

Hospices

Writer Syd Moore (centre, back row) with previous Havens Hospices Reading Round participants in Essex

Writer Syd Moore previously facilitated a Reading Round group for outpatients of Havens Hospices, which provides care and support to adults living with incurable conditions and their families in Essex. “When palliative patients receive their diagnosis their world shrinks. The Reading Round works so well because it makes few demands: participants don’t have to use their hands, arms or legs,” she says.

“The first time I delivered a Reading Round at Fair Havens one of the members remarked, ‘it’s the only time in my week when I don’t think about cancer.’”

This year, the RLF’s Reading Round Hospice sessions will bring the joy of reading to more Hospice and Recovery College settings across the UK, including Norwich, Eastbourne, Southend, Newport, and Dungannon, Northern Ireland; as well as planned groups in Dundee, Hastings, Northampton, Ipswich, London, Brighton and Kent.

Prisons

The first Reading Round sessions in prisons will include groups in HMP Leeds, HMP Liverpool, HMP East Sutton Park, HMP Brixton and HMP Bristol.

RLF writer and group leader, Clare Shaw, who will be running a Reading Round group at HMP Leeds says:

I’m so excited to be running the Reading Round at HMP Leeds. We all know that reading can make our lives richer and happier – and my last Reading Round showed me that in places of hardship and times of struggle, the impact of literature can be life-changing, even live-saving.

Libraries

Libraries are also the focus of enhanced RLF activity with a series of free Collected: Live panel events across the UK.

These events, named after the RLF’s fortnightly podcast Collected: The Podcast which is also devoting airtime to reading-specific themes to highlight the National Year of Reading, features writers celebrating books and the writing life. Additional Reading Round library sessions will also run in nine regions of England from September including Liverpool, Morpeth, Leeds, Leicester, Stourbridge, Upper Norwood, Bath and Willingdon. Writers taking part include poet and playwright Testament, children’s author Jasbinder Bilan, crime writer Louise Millar and poet Harry Man.

Special one-off sessions of Reading Round are also planned to mark the Reading Agency’s annual Book Club Day on Friday 11 September. These sessions will take place across the UK in Inverness library, Dunoon library, Alloa Speirs Centre Library, Larbert Library, Coatbridge Library, Paisley Central Library, Carnegie Library, Ayr and five libraries across Edinburgh including Granton, Muirhouse, Portobello, Stockbridge and Wester Hailes library.

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