World Book Day

The main aim of World Book Day (WBD) is to encourage people to explore the pleasures of books and reading by providing them with the opportunity to have a book of their own.

For ideas on what schools can do for WBD go to Reading Connects pages For information on WBD visit www.worldbookday.com or call the World Book Day helpline: 01634 729810, wbd@education.co.uk

Spread the Word is the adult strand of WBD. The campaign focuses on adults recommending books to each other via postcards and email. In 2008 the public will be asked to vote on a longlist of 100 titles of fiction by living authors who have not won a major award. Ten shortlisted titles will then become the focus of Spread the Word: Talk about Books reading groups which will be held in libraries and bookshops on or around WBD. For more information, to add your vote, or enter the competition, visit www.worldbookday.com/spreadtheword/Quick Reads is a major initiative from leading publishers, booksellers and writers that was launched in 2006.

Quick Reads 2008
For more information view details on the Vital Link pages or www.niace.org.uk/QuickReads/

An 'Apprentice'-style reality TV show which will turn one of six celebrities into a crime author, mentored by Minette Walters and published by Pan Macmillan, in celebration of World Book Day 2008.


"Murder Most Famous", will be broadcast on BBC2 during the week of World Book Day. The series will be broadcast in five daily 45-minute episodes, and pits six celebrities - dancer Brendan Cole, actresses Sherrie Hewson and Angela Griffin, former tabloid editor Kelvin MacKenzie, presenter Matt Allwright and gardener Diarmuid Gavin - against each other.
They will be mentored by Walters, who will set a series of challenges to inspire the celebrities' daily writing tasks. Training will include dog tracking, resisting a violent attack, an autopsy, crime scene investigation, interrogation techniques and rapid pursuit of a suspect. Walters will judge the celebrities' writing efforts and eliminate one candidate each day.

The winner will turn their plot and central characters into a novel, to be published with Pan as a Quick Read on WBD 2009, in conjunction with the BBC's adult literacy campaign RaW. The proceeds will go towards BBC Children in Need.

The day has finally arrived and we are proud to annouce that Boy A by Jonathan Trigell has been voted The Book To Talk About! For more details and to see where the other titles came in the top ten please download our press release. Happy World Book Day and thanks to all you who voted.

Boy A
by Jonathan Trigell
published by Serpent’s Tailprice £7.99

Jack has spent most of his life in juvenile prisons, but he’s about to be released with a new name, a new job and a new life. At 24, he is utterly innocent of the world, yet guilty of a monstrous childhood crime.To his new friends, he is a good guy with occasional flashes of unexplained violence. To his girlfriend, he is strangely naïve and unreachable. To his case worker, he’s a victim of the system and of media driven hysteria. To himself, Jack is on permanent trial: he struggles to start from scratch, forget the past, become someone else. A searing and heartfelt novel, Boy A won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.The perfect novel for book groups and anyone who enjoys getting to grips with difficult issues in their reading, Boy A is about whether the rehabilitation of children who commit crime is the right thing for society, how we fail such children, and whether it is ever really possible to change the path of a disturbed child. In a world where the media artificially ages photographs in order to try to locate released perpetrators who are hiding under a new identity, and where tabloid campaigns result in vigilante groups pursuing people they believe are guilty of terrible crimes, Boy A examines whether in fact it is us who owe a debt to such children, and whether they deserve our sympathy or our scorn. Though it did win the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, Boy A is still a very low profile book, which we firmly believe deserves wider attention. As controversial as Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, it has the potential to engage readers in lively moral discussions and encourage them to examine their own attitudes to such situations.