Gisèle Pelicot has described the moment she fell in love and was able to trust again after her rape ordeal orchestrated by her former husband in France.

Pelicot, 73, waived her right to anonymity during the trial of Dominique Pelicot, who was jailed for 20 years in 2024 for drugging and raping her and allowing other men to sexually assault her while she was unconscious, over almost a decade.

Speaking at the Hay festival in Wales on Saturday, she said she never thought she could trust a man again before meeting her partner, Jean-Loup Agopian.

The campaigner said: “It’s something that I didn’t think could happen, especially at my age, first of all, I didn’t really want to fall in love, but life decided otherwise.

“We met, our trajectories crossed at one moment and I met this young man of 73… You see, you can fall in love at any age, it happened to me, it can happen to you, I’m convinced of it.

“I didn’t think that I’d be able to trust a man, but it’s what happened to me, so you see that everything can be allowed in life, you must never despair.”

Pelicot appeared at the festival to discuss her memoir A Hymn to Life and was interviewed on stage by Lady Kennedy.

She said that “society has got to wake up” on the issue of violence against women, and that it’s an “appalling evil that touches all borders”.

“I thought that my story only related to me, but I realised that, in fact, it was really the tree that hid the forest,” she continued.

Yet, she feels “serene” about the future for women, because “I think that we can all live together in harmony, men and women, and I think it’s a question of educating our children very young”.

“Maybe I’m a very optimistic person by nature, but I would hope that the human being will go towards peace and love.”

Last month, French authorities launched an investigation into the reappearance of a website Dominique Pelicot used to recruit dozens of strangers to rape his wife in their home between 2011 and 2020. Authorities said the French-language platform Coco has been linked to crimes, including the sexual abuse of children, rape and murder. The website, which was registered abroad, was shut down in June 2024.

Pelicot described it as an “absolute miracle” to be speaking on stage, because “the way in which [Dominique] sedated me, he sedated me so strongly, I’m wondering how my heart and my body was able to hold for so long”.

When Pelicot was being unknowingly drugged, people around her wondered whether she was drunk or unwell. “My children and my friends were very worried for me, because very often when I was on the phone with them, I often repeated the same things, but I don’t remember that at all.”

Pelicot described taking years to decide to waive her right to anonymity. When her decision was announced in court in front of the 51 men who were ultimately declared guilty of rape and their lawyers, she realised they were going to “make me pay for it very dearly, and that’s what happened, they really tried to humiliate me”.

Pelicot’s daughter, Caroline Darian, is also pursuing legal action against Dominique Pelicot. Among the images in his possession were two photos of his daughter in which she is unconscious on a bed wearing underwear that is not her own. Pelicot said she believed there had been “an incestuous attitude towards his daughter that was intolerable”.

She said Darian “didn’t find justice” during Pelicot’s case, and that she hopes her daughter will win her own case, in order to “rebuild herself”.

Pelicot also praised Darian’s advocacy group M’endors pas, which campaigns against chemical submission. She invited her onstage, and said that she was “really proud” to be her mother.

Fewer than one in 10 boys aged 14 to 16 in the UK read daily, according to research, which found reading for pleasure was being crowded out of teenage lives by schoolwork, screens and sports.

While reading declines for both boys and girls in early adolescence, there are “signs of recovery” among girls in later teenage years, but boys’ engagement remains persistently low, according to the National Literacy Trust (NLT).

An NLT survey of 80,000 young people aged 11 to 16 found almost half (46.9%) of eight- to 11-year-olds enjoyed reading. That fell to less than a third (29.5%) among 11- to 14-year-olds and slipped even further to 28.6% for 14- to 16-year-olds.

By mid-adolescence, daily reading is “uncommon”, the report concludes, with 31.1% of children aged eight to 11 reading daily, dropping to 17.1% between the ages of 11 and 14, and 14% of those aged 14 to 16.

Reading rates are lower for boys at every age. Over a third of girls (36%) aged eight to 11 said they read daily, compared with about a quarter (26.3%) of boys of the same age. By the age of 14 to 16, this had fallen to 17.6% of girls and just 9.8% of boys.

Jonathan Douglas, the NLT chief executive, said: “Over the past 20 years, children and young people’s enjoyment of reading and their daily reading habits have fallen steeply to their lowest levels on record, with the drop especially pronounced for teenagers.

“As young people grow older, reading increasingly competes with a multitude of pressures on their time, changing routines, a wider range of interests and activities and greater independence. As a result, reading can become easier to displace, particularly when it is not rooted in daily life. Teenage boys’ reading is especially fragile.”

The publication of the report, called Teenage reading: (Re)framing the challenge, coincides with the National Year of Reading, a year-long UK-wide campaign, led by the Department for Education and the NLT, to boost reading for pleasure, particularly among children and young people.

The author Phil Earle, whose novel When the Sky Falls won the British Book Award’s Children’s Book of the Year in 2022, said: “If we are serious about this situation then it won’t mean a year of work, it means a generation of it, with absolute commitment from government, educators, TV companies, radio, streamers, social media organisations, publishers and writers.”

He called for change, saying: “We need to banish centuries of snobbery about reading and its use in education. We need to let the children guide us on what they want to read, and we need to address the age-old issue of children’s authors being seen more across the media, giving them a platform that is visible to parents, but more importantly, to the readers themselves.

“It won’t be easy, and it won’t be quick, but we can retain our readers by reminding them way before they’re teenagers that reading isn’t just about novels too.”

The NLT study, shared exclusively with the Guardian, includes almost 50,000 comments from 11- to 16-year-olds providing insights into their views on reading and how it fits – or does not fit – into modern teenagers’ everyday lives.

There are many positive comments from teenage boys, who said they found reading peaceful and mentally restorative. “If I’m upset, I can read a book to calm down,” said one contributor. “Reading is great for when you have a bad day at school. You can just read a book to … stop you from being worried,” said another.

They also enjoyed learning through reading. “I like reading because I gain better knowledge,” said another.

Often, however, reading for pleasure loses out to schoolwork. “I don’t have the time to enjoy books when I am already drowning in textbooks,” said one. Many preferred spending time on sport, gaming and socialising with family and friends. Others liked reading digitally. “I don’t enjoy reading a book, but I enjoy reading things on my phone, computer and more,” said one.

Many boys still value reading, though they may find it difficult to fit it into their lives, while others said they were put off because they found it difficult. “I am dyslexic and don’t enjoy it as it’s too hard, my attention span is too short and I find other things more entertaining,” said one.

Douglas said: “Teenagers themselves told us they are more likely to read when it connects to their interests, such as football, video games and friendship, when they have choice over what and how they read, and when reading fits naturally into their lives.

“Recognising how reading competes with, and can complement, the many ways young people engage with text today will be key to helping more teenagers develop and sustain a reading habit which can boost their learning, wellbeing and confidence at a pivotal moment in their lives.”

In 1998, the late journalist Joan Didion wrote a scathing essay about the posthumous publication of True at First Light, a travel journal and fictional memoir by Ernest Hemingway, 38 years after the author killed himself. “This is a man to whom words mattered. He worked at them, he understood them, he got inside them,” Didion wrote. “His wish to be survived by only the words he determined fit for publication would have seemed clear enough.”

Just over a year later, in December 1999, Didion began writing her own journal about her sessions with a psychiatrist. She addressed these notes – detailing her struggles with alcoholism, anxiety, guilt and depression, a sometimes fraught relationship with her adopted daughter Quintana and reflections on her childhood and legacy – to her husband, John Gregory Dunne.

The announcement that these post-psychiatry notes, discovered by Didion’s literary executors in an unlabelled folder shortly after she died in 2021, are to be published in April has raised questions around the ethics of posthumous publishing.

Didion left no instructions to her trustees – her literary editor Lynn Nesbit, and two of her longtime editors, Shelley Wanger and Sharon DeLano – about how to handle the deeply private journal after her death from complications of Parkinson’s disease.

In total, 46 entries were found – printed out and placed in chronological order – in a portable filing cabinet next to her desk. They will be published in their entirety, with only minimal editing, such as footnotes and corrections of typos, under the title Notes to John.

The book is already being hyped as “an unmissable publication” from “one of the most iconic writers of our time” by its UK publisher 4th Estate, an imprint of HarperCollins. According to the publisher, the “meticulous” notes of conversations Didion had with her psychiatrist were central to Didion’s understanding of the themes she turned to in her celebrated late works, such as her memoirs The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, in which she writes about Quintana and John’s deaths.

A close friend of Didion, who wished to remain anonymous, told the Observer: “I have no doubt that this document will further our collective astonishment at Joan’s work, but I also cannot think of anything more private than notes kept about one’s psychiatry sessions. It’s not my place to say what Joan would have wanted, but as someone who loved her very much, the publication of these pages makes me terrifically sad.”

They said that, after discovering that Didion’s literary executors had decided to publish the notes, several of Didion’s closest friends and family members had shared similar feelings of disappointment and anguish: “The collective feeling in her inner circle is that her privacy has been betrayed … While I, of course, understand the public thirst for this document, given Joan’s extraordinary place in American letters, Joan was nothing if not meticulous and intentional with the details she decided to share – and not share – in The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. Anything beyond that seems to me a tremendous betrayal of her privacy by the people she trusted the most.”

Dr Rod Rosenquist, who lectures at the University of Northampton on the ethics of posthumous publishing, said the journal was bound to generate interest due to the “cult of Joan Didion”, which saw items such as her $12 blank notebooks fetch $9,000 at the auction of her estate by her heirs in 2022. “She is a celebrity writer within literary circles … and what I think is so interesting about public figures is that they are owned – manipulated in some ways – by the public,” he said.

Readers are hungry to better understand the inner life of an author they admire, he added: “That’s the very nature of celebrity.”

It is for this reason that writers such as Henry James and Charles Dickens burned their personal papers while they were still alive. But since Didion did not do this or instruct her literary executors not to publish the notes, leaving them “carefully organised” near her desk, where they were bound to be found, then “legally everyone’s acting within their rights and acting in ways that the market encourages them to act”, he said.

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On an ethical and emotional level, however, he personally found the decision to publish Notes to John “disturbing”: “I don’t feel comfortable with anyone’s private journals being published this early.” Although there has been “public interest” in posthumously publishing the journal of a great writer many years after their death, he thinks that, even in these circumstances, therapy should be protected. “That’s my position. But I do think it’s debatable.”

Paul Bogaards, a spokesperson for the Didion Dunne Literary Trust, said the trust “respectfully declined” to comment.

Didion’s biographer, Tracy Daugh­erty, said he did not think Didion – “a careful curator of her image” – would have assumed that the personal nature of the journal protected it from “those who’d want to make it public”. “She was not naive about either publishing or human nature … Leaving behind something as rich as this journal promises to be could not be accidental.”

Didion was in decline in her later years but she was not incapacitated, he said. “She had to know that this journal would be, in her terms, ‘gold’.”

Brimham Rocks in North Yorkshire has its first writer in residence, who has been recruited by the National Trust to create works inspired by the “mysterious and awe-inspiring rock formations”.

Natalie Anastasia Davies, who is Yorkshire-born and of Grenadian descent, will in her new role explore themes of cultural identity and the climate crisis, as well as connection and memory.

She will be in the post until October, creating and running workshops for the public, and working with local primary schoolchildren to help them write their own thoughts on Brimham Rocks.

The residency will culminate in a public event at which budding nature writers will be able to share their work.

Davies said: “As a writer and human being, I believe that connection with the natural world is integral to our sense of meaning and wellbeing.

“It is a rare thing in our bustling lives to have time in nature; to be, realise and create. I feel privileged to be chosen as the first Brimham Rocks writer in residence and plan to fully embrace this opportunity.”

Brimham Rocks, north of Harrogate and close to Pateley Bridge, is a collection of large dramatically shaped rocks, spread across 20 hectares (50 acres) of moorland. Their history dates back more than 340m years.

Made from millstone grit, the stones are of geological significance and some of the rocks have attracted nicknames over time, such as “druid’s altar”.

The site is popular with hikers and climbers, as well as daytrippers from Yorkshire and beyond.

The residency comes after the Yorkshire-born poet laureate Simon Armitage was commissioned last year to write a poem inspired by Brimham Rocks. His work, Balancing Act, celebrates the site and why it is an important place for people and nature.

“It was a chance to get reacquainted with the rocks. I’d explored them as a child and in my memory, they were almost mythical or pieces of an alien landscape,” Armitage said at the time.

“Coming back to the area as an adult, and a poet, they were no less fascinating and mysterious but carried new messages connected to the environment, the precarious state of nature and the importance of wild spaces to our wellbeing.”

The National Trust partnered with Word Up North, a literature development organisation, to create the new residency, which offered a writer from the Yorkshire and the Humber region “a paid opportunity to develop their creative practice and offers visitors, local communities, young people and aspiring writers the chance to engage more deeply with Brimham Rocks”.

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Jen Taylor, the visitor operations manager for National Trust Brimham Rocks, said: “The intention is for the writer in residence to get to know Brimham Rocks, the people who visit and to really engage with the place and the opportunity it presents to create a conversation about nature and climate.

“The workshops will provide participants with an opportunity to engage more deeply with the site, its ecology, geology and social history through creative writing workshops, walks and other associated activities.”

Erica Morris, the director of Word Up North, said: “We are thrilled to see the enormously talented Natalie Anastasia Davies appointed and look forward to seeing the playfulness she’ll bring to her work with both children and adults through her workshops and work with local schools.

“Her particular interest in responding to the people at Brimham Rocks – especially its visitors – and exploring how local details can illuminate global issues make us incredibly excited to see what she creates in response to the site,” she added.

Davies said: “It’s such a pleasure to collaborate with the amazing team at the National Trust and Word Up North and I look forward to sharing this unique experience with communities and developing writers”