Our various projects allow us to reach a diverse range of readers and non-readers, extending the individual experience with literature and building strong, mutually supportive communities that read together.

The pages on this wesbsite will guide you through exactly what it is that we do but here’s a little summary:

Get Into Reading

“You need it, you just don’t know you need it.” Our Get Into Reading project delivers weekly read aloud reading groups across the UK, bringing books and people together to bring the reading experience to life.

Events and Publications

Our quarterly magazine, The Reader, our anthologies A Little, Aloud and Poems to Take Home, the Penny Readings, our annual conference, and our big book giveaway, Our Read.

Read to Lead Training

Through our Read to Lead training programme, we’re able to disseminate the shared reading model that is at the heart of Get Into Reading, enabling people across the UK – and to Europe and Australia to develop the skills and understanding necessary to lead shared reading groups.

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Here are some of the other things we’ve done in the past few years:

community theatre

In 2008, we coordinated Wirral Community Shakespeare’s production of The Winter’s Tale in Birkenhead Park. It was seen by over 1500 people over five performances, and involved 30 members of the local community in the production.

“I suffered a breakdown that took me four years to get over. I recognise the self-healing nature of participating in theatre. I saw many people in this production fight their demons by stepping onto that stage. It made us feel, some of us for the first time, that, ‘Yes, I can do this’.”

The success of this led to Merseyside Community Theatre: ‘Romeo and Juliet at the Fire Station’ in 2010: an eight-month outreach project leading to four fantastic, community-led productions of Shakespeare’s enduring love story that included over 100 members of a multiply-deprived area in North Liverpool.

“It was, without a doubt, the best thing I have ever done. Although it was tough work, it was also the most fun I have ever had.”

Sonja Sohn reads at Croxteth Fire Station

“I’m impressed by the passion and level of commitment to those The Reader Organisation serves and am delighted to participate in an event which supports such important work.” The Wire’s Sonja Sohn

shipping lines: liverpool literary festival

Hosted by the University of Liverpool, coordinated by us, this was a literary celebration of Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture 2008. The festival, which played host to some of our best contemporary writers such as Philip Pullman, Carol Ann Duffy, Roger McGough and Simon Armitage, saw audience numbers of over 1000 people across 50 events.

liverpool reads…

Liverpool Reads… The Savage: 20,000 copies of David Almond and Dave McKean’s book given out across Merseyside with the help of fire fighters! In 2010, Liverpool Reads became Our Read.