Digital installation at Foyles
Cityread promotes reading for pleasure, gets more people using their libraries, and celebrates and explores London through its stories. Every April more than 30,000 Londoners engage in a shared, cultural experience that connects us to each other and the city where we live and work.
VISIT websiteWe have no current international projects.
Cityread is important and effective. It is the only cultural festival that brings the capital's individual library services together in one joined-up, cohesive and compelling offer. Since 2012, Cityread has generated income of over £1.5 million for libraries and created over 1000 training opportunities for library staff. Our evaluation shows that Cityread brings new audiences to libraries. More than a quarter of 2015 Cityread audiences said they were visiting the library for the first time in over a year.
We work with a wide range of partners across the arts, cultural, heritage and commercial sectors to bring our chosen novel to life through performance, author events, history talks and writing workshops.
Cityread also works with specialist partners to engage readers in prisons, readers whose first language is not English, emergent adult readers, children and young readers, and homeless readers.
At Cityread we are fascinated with the power of sharing a good book, the conversations that a brilliant story can open up, and how those stories can be explored through immersive performance through to intimate supper events.
We would love to hear from anyone who's interested in extending our bookish conversations into other art forms, and from anyone else running community reading programmes globally.
At a basic level, we would see lots of value in sharing information, contacts and ideas. We're interested in international collaborations and love the idea of 'twinning' with another city reading programme overseas.
Founder and CEO - Andy Ryan
