World Book Night launched in 2011 and saw 20,000 passionate readers across
the UK give 1 million books to spread the joy and love of reading. Reading
changes lives and at the heart of World Book Night lies the simplest of ideas
and acts - that of putting a book into another person’s hand and saying ‘this
one’s amazing, you have to read it’.
World Book Night 2012 will be held on April 23 and is once more looking for
20,000 volunteer givers. This year the givers will be distributing 24 copies
each (480,000 books) with further books distributed directly to prisons and
libraries through charitable partners.
As the first festival names for 2012 are revealed, Membership Scheme Manager Laura Brand enjoys a special preview of the Summer season...
I’ve always liked this time of year. Not the cold of course, or the long, dark
evenings, but the anticipation of a new year, and all of the plans that I find
myself making, now that January’s here.
So it seems only right that this is the time when the first
2012 Festival programme details come out too.
Putting together Directors’ Picks
(our Members’ magazine) is always really interesting for us here in the
Marketing team, as it’s the first time that we get to hear all that the
Festival Directors have planned.
This year looks great, with Paloma Faith at Jazz and Nigel Kennedy
at Music. And as well as the headliners,
there are all kinds of interesting events that I’m looking forward to as well:
a 1920s dance at art-deco favourite,
The Daffodil, a “Salute to London”
classical music concert and a series of Re:generation
themed talks at the Science Festival.
Directors, Artists in Residence and Festival favourites have
all contributed to Directors’ Picks
with their picks of the programme and behind the scenes interviews. In fact, many of them had so much to say that
it wouldn’t all fit into one magazine, so we’re lucky to have extended
interviews online.
The Festival teams are busily at work putting the final
touches to their programmes, which are released first to Members next month. But for now, Directors’ Picks (which you can browse through below) is a great place to begin, and to start making
plans for the summer.
World Book Night launched in 2011 and saw 20,000 passionate readers across
the UK give 1 million books to spread the joy and love of reading. Reading
changes lives and at the heart of World Book Night lies the simplest of ideas
and acts - that of putting a book into another person’s hand and saying ‘this
one’s amazing, you have to read it’.