Zeno Sworder’s beautifully illustrated picture book Once I Was a Giant, which tells the tale of a tree transformed into a pencil who writes its own story, has won book of the year at the 2026 Australian Book Industry Awards.

It’s the Melbourne writer and illustrator’s third children’s book, following My Strange Shrinking Parents (2023) – winner of the Victorian Premier’s Literary prize; and This Small Blue Dot (2021), which took home best new illustrator at the Children’s Book Council of Australia awards.

Sworder’s hopeful and poetic bedtime read, written for ages zero to six, covers the span of a tree’s life and its relationships with the world around it. It also won the 2026 Victorian Premier’s Literary award for children’s literature in February, with the judges calling it “profoundly moving” with “glowing illustrations”.

At a ceremony in Sydney on Thursday night, the beloved children’s writer Mem Fox was recognised in the hall of fame for “outstanding service to the Australian book industry”. Earlier this year, Fox’s classic Possum Magic was voted No 2 in Guardian Australia’s reader poll of the best Australian picture book of all time. Author and former bookseller Paul Macdonald, who owned the Children’s Bookshop in Sydney for close to two decades, was also honoured in the hall of fame.

The annual awards, now in its 26th year, are judged by more than 50 representatives from publishing houses, distributors, literary journalists, agents, booksellers and librarians.

Winners of the adult book categories included Sally Hepworth’s thriller Mad Mabel, which was presented with the general fiction and the audiobook awards; Geraldine Brooks’ memoir Memorial Days, which won in the biography category; and the Mushroom Tapes by Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein, which won the prize for general nonfiction.

A Piece of Red Cloth, a collaborative historical novel written by Leonie Norrington, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Djawa Burarrwanga and Djawundil Maymura, about a Yolŋu elder trying to protect their granddaughter from being kidnapped, won social impact book of the year.

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy won the literary fiction book of the year, and the Matt Richell award for new writer of the year was awarded to Angie Faye Martin for crime drama Melaleuca.

A “highly original” nonfiction by Melbourne historian Clare Wright, charting the creation of the Yirrkala Bark Petitions – a seminal moment in Australia’s history of land rights – has won book of the year at the NSW literary awards.

The Petitions were landmark documents presented by Yolŋu elders to the Australian parliament in 1963 on painted bark frames, which sought government intervention after a portion of Arnhem Land Reserve was licensed to a French mining company. Though it didn’t halt mining on the land, the petitions led to the first land rights legislation in Australia, the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976.

Written more like a novel than a historical nonfiction, Näku Dhäruk: The Bark Petitions treats its subjects as characters, bringing the reader along with their political aspirations and acts of resilience, without the sense of inevitability that usually accompanies a work of history.

At a ceremony at the NSW state library on Monday night, Näku Dhäruk won the $10,000 top prize along with the $40,000 Douglas Stewart prize for nonfiction. Judges called the book “a work of national significance”, saying the personal accounts included in the narrative felt “vividly alive” with “an extraordinary depth of research and sophisticated scholarship”.

“It is a book that should be read by all Australians,” judges said.

Näku Dhäruk: The Bark Petitions is the third in Wright’s “democracy trilogy” about three defining moments in Australia’s political history, including the 2014 Stella prize-winning Forgotten Rebels of Eureka, which shares the stories of women who united during the 1850s Eureka Stockade, and You Daughters of Freedom, about white Australian women winning the right to vote.

Wright, who was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in 2020 for her outstanding “service to literature, and to historical research”, has already picked up multiple awards for Näku Dhäruk, including the 2025 Australian Political book of the year. Speaking to Guardian Australia before she knew she had won the main prize at the NSW literary awards, the author joked that her book’s cover design is now “more stickers than cover”. “If it was a bottle of wine, you would be buying a case,” she said, laughing.

Wright spent a decade writing Näku Dhäruk. She calls the 640-page work “collaborative”, speaking of her time living and working with the Yirrkala community.

“The Yolŋu people wanted me to tell it because they wanted Australia to know their story,” she said. “Readers who have spent time in north-east Arnhem Land with Yolŋu people tell me that [reading the book] felt like going home, it felt like being … in that very special remarkable part of the world.”

The La Trobe University professor is considered a culturally adopted member of the Yunupiŋu family, she said; it was 1978 Australian of the Year Galarrwuy Yunupiŋu who gave Wright the language title of the book in 2020. Näku means “bark” and Dhäruk means “the word” or “message” in Yolŋu matha (tongue).

“There was a lot of nervousness as to whether the Australian public would be able to cope with a book that had a language title,” Wright said. The fact that it’s had its fourth print in just over a year is proof “there is a hunger and a desire to read stories that enrich our sense of the nation’s past”.

Other winners on Monday night included Moreno Giovannoni, who won the $40,000 Christina Stead prize for fiction for The Immigrants – “an absolute gem of a novel,” said the judges, which blends fiction and family memoir.

The Multicultural NSW award went to playwright S Shakthidharan for Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath, a “lyrical” book that “expands the genre of memoir”, the judges said.

In the children’s book categories, Gone by Michel Streich won the Patricia Wrightson prize for children’s literature and Marly Wells and Linda Wells shared the Ethel Turner prize for young people’s literature for Desert Tracks.

The Black Woman of Gippsland by Andrea James took home the Nick Enright prize for playwriting, and the Betty Roland prize for scriptwriting went to Shaun Grant for episode four of the drama miniseries The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

The Kenneth Slessor prize for poetry was awarded to Jill Jones for How to Emerge, which judges said was “a mastery of catalogue and repetition”.

The Indigenous Writers’ prize went to Natalie Harkin for Apron-Sorrow / Sovereign-Tea, praised for covering “a brutal chapter in our history”, about First Nations women being used as indentured servants in South Australia.

Micaela Sahhar won the UTS Glenda Adams award for new writing for a “deeply moving, confronting and life-affirming book”, Find Me at the Jaffa Gate. And the University of Sydney’s people’s choice award went to Emily Maguire for the author’s “rapturous” prose in historical novel Rapture.

A new report has found that the number of banned non-fiction books doubled during the 2024-2025 school year in the US.

PEN America analysed the 3,743 unique titles removed from school libraries and classrooms in the July to June period and found that over 1,100 or 29% were non-fiction, more than double the year prior.

The most common theme in the banned non-fiction books was activism and social movements. “These titles help students learn about their rights and the stories of those who confronted injustice and participated in social movements to change the world around them,” said McKenna Samson, a co-author of the report.

Banned non-fiction titles included Challenges for LGBTQ+ Teens by Martha Lundin, Aztec, Inca, and Maya by Elizabeth Baquedano and Night by Elie Wiesel, a Nazi death camp memoir.

“This latest trend shows an embrace of anti-intellectualism, undermining public knowledge by devaluing education and expertise,” said Kasey Meehan, director of PEN America’s freedom to read program. “It is another example of how censorship sweeps broadly, leading to removals of all kinds of books, in its efforts to sow fear and distrust in our public education system.”

The year also saw double the percentage of books about sex education being banned, including titles such as You Know, Sex: Bodies, Gender, Puberty and Other Things by Cory Silverberg.

Findings also showed high figures for marginalised communities with LGBTQ+ characters (39%) and people of colour (44%) continuing to be over-represented in the books being targeted.

Books about death and grief made up 48% of titles while those about empowerment and self-esteem made up 39%.

Fiction titles at risk in the past year included dystopian dramas such as Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and other books including To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and Push by Sapphire.

Since PEN America started documenting book bans in 2021, there have been more than 23,000 instances on record.

A report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress last year showed that a third of 12th-graders who had been federally tested did not have basic reading skills. Scores were the worst they had been for three decades.

The report arrives after findings from the American Library Association which shows that books banned in all US libraries saw a record high in 2025. Similarly, 40% of the titles challenged involved representations of LGBTQ+ people or people of colour.

The narrator of Deborah Levy’s witty scherzo of a “fiction” – “novel” isn’t the word for this uncategorisable book – thinks that Gertrude Stein would have liked Sigmund Freud. She imagines them enjoying a cigar together while their wives make small talk. Would Frau Freud “have exchanged her recipe for boiled beef with Alice B [Toklas]’s recipe for hashish fudge”? The two never met (though with her interest in the “bottom character” and his in the “unconscious”, Stein and Freud would have had plenty to talk about), but that barely matters. This book is full of things that don’t actually happen, of relationships that are not what the people involved suppose them to be, of digressions and fantasies and encounters that are imagined but never take place.

It all starts with a lost cat. The cat is called “it”: lower-case “i” followed by lower-case “t”. This causes all sorts of linguistic confusion, highlighting the way we use the word “it” to mean something indeterminate (as in the first sentence of this paragraph), or something trivial, or something tremendous. The phrase “lost it” recurs, the “it” meaning – variously – one’s mind, sympathy with Ernest Hemingway, daring to be as unconventional as Gertrude Stein, the stream of consciousness “flowing under the mowed and manicured golf courses on which men swung their clubs in the 21st century”, the temptation to smile while being undermined by a patronising man, the drudgery of housekeeping, the thing – which might be obedience or shame – that holds an artist back from becoming a modernist … or love, or one’s mother, or a black-and-white cat with one deformed ear.

The book doesn’t exactly have a plot, but there is a situation. Three female friends are in Paris. The narrator (English, single) is writing, or failing to write, an essay about Gertrude Stein. Eva (Spanish-Danish, married to a man in Seattle whom she sees once a week, if that, on FaceTime) is a graphic novelist. Fanny (French, polyamorous with three female lovers) is a financier.

Fanny is impatient, annoyingly often on her phone at mealtimes and capable of spite. Sexy and chic, she thinks Stein’s “knitted woollen stocking would have been erotically catastrophic” and says her “repetition drives me in-saane”. But she is also secretly vulnerable, wounded by her father’s homophobic rejection and more invested in the three-way friendship than either of the others. When the narrator is knocked off her bicycle, it is Fanny who comes to help, having first queued for eight minutes to buy a rum baba bouchon with a slice of roasted pineapple on top. It’s for the narrator – a kind thought – but Fanny explains to her that “if I was dead by the time she reached [me] she would eat it herself”.

Eva looks angelic, and the fuss about her lost cat makes her seem childish, but it gradually dawns on the narrator, and on us, that she is actually commercially astute and emotionally cool. Her all-white apartment is exquisite and so is the fat-free food she serves. She appoints herself the narrator’s assistant, says she will illustrate the Stein essay, and finally announces, without any consultation, that she will take over the project and write it herself. The reason her husband isn’t there is that he is building her a house. Whatever “it” is for her, Eva knows how to get it.

Suspended between these two new friends, the narrator, older and lonelier, moons around Père Lachaise cemetery and frets that however much she finds out about Stein’s life, she can’t get to the “it” of it. Late in the book a kind of romance starts up. Hunting for the lost cat, the three women come across an eligible man of the narrator’s age. He leads them for a moment into a Buñuelesque mystery. He also has a cat with a deformed ear. What’s going on here? He takes the narrator out to dinner, but this courtship is something else that fails to happen – all he wants from her is Eva’s phone number.

Despite the title, the action of the framing story takes place over one month, November 2024, the last month the three friends will be together in Paris, and the month of Donald Trump’s re-election. The narrator watches wars on her phone, the violence interrupted onscreen by adverts for vitamins or life insurance, and IRL by the bells of Notre-Dame.

Most of the time, though, her mind is in Stein’s lifetime, and she carries us there with her. Levy is not competing with Stein’s many biographers. She is writing a meditation, not a chronicle or an explanation. The narrator thinks that, for all her insistence on confining herself to simple words, Stein didn’t “believe in” being understood. “When I look at photographs,” she writes, “I cannot get into her eyes.”

Levy can, though, carry us into the Paris of Stein’s era and introduce us around. She chooses her quotes astutely. Seven lines from On the Road tell us all we need to know about Jack Kerouac’s vanity. A put-down from Virginia Woolf nicely punctures Walt Whitman’s self-righteousness. She has a great knack for summing up a character with one detail. Of the artist Chaïm Soutine: “a doctor had to remove a nest of bedbugs from his ear”. Of Marie Vassilieff, another artist: “When Modigliani arrived, drunk, looking for a fight, she lifted her arms and pushed him down the stairs. Then she carved the chicken.” Of Stein: “she was so forward‑looking that she never learned to reverse her Ford Model T”.

We are not to assume that the narrator is Levy – this is “a fiction”, after all – but of one thing we can be certain. Eva may announce that the essay on Stein will never get written, but here it is – odd, inventive and wonderfully entertaining – triumphantly proving her wrong.

Wayne Koestenbaum has built himself a slow-burn reputation as one of America’s sharpest queer iconoclasts, but the title of his latest novel suggests Netflix-ready realism. Will My Lover, the Rabbi be a sober yet uplifting account of the conflict between religious orthodoxy and forbidden desire? Not a bit of it. The book’s central and anchoring fact – the overwhelming desire of a man who works as an antique furniture restorer for a man who works in a synagogue – is accepted as a given by every single character. The writing, meanwhile, treats all realist convention with a kind of exalted scorn, conjuring the dangers and delights of obsession in prose that is itself unashamedly obsessive – and wonderfully frank when it gets down to the physical details. The result is as fierce and strange as anything you’re going to read this year.

The fierceness begins immediately. All the book’s 188 chapters are short, but the first one comes in at only four lines. Putting both punctuation and vocabulary to tactically unexpected use, it plunges the reader straight into a world of carnality, confusion and bizarrely specific detail. Like all but a handful of the chapters, it also includes the title of the book itself. And as the book proceeds, this reiteration of the title begins to toll like a bell through the architecture of its prose, becoming almost a mantra. Far from being style-for-style’s sake, this insistent and anxious formality is at the heart of the book’s uncanny life; a quite brilliant matching of style to subject.

As a plot begins to emerge, the book seems – bizarrely, given its otherwise staunchly modernist mechanics – to be almost 19th century in its storyline. Though set in a recognisable America of anonymous lakeside apartments, ageing conspiracy theorists and alternative family structures, the main plot points could be straight out of Balzac: infidelity, illegitimacy, madness, shopping, coincidences and death. As in Balzac – or Proust, for that matter, another expert in the mechanics of obsession – it eventually turns out that almost all the characters have either slept with each other or are otherwise entangled.

Even more Proustian is the furniture restorer’s need to discover the secret of his rabbi’s attractiveness, something he experiences as both imperious and inexplicable. Like Proust’s Swann, he persuades himself that the key to his love object’s allure must lie not so much in their lovemaking as in some undisclosed emotional hinterland. Eventually, the narrator decides the mystery he has to solve is that of the death of his lover’s three-year-old son. Thereafter, every attempt to explicate who this child was, why he died and whether he is in fact even dead reveals only further vistas of unknowability.

Around this central conundrum, the plot spirals into a dizzying series of interconnected withholdings, digressions and non sequiturs, punctuated at regular intervals by a series of unashamedly filthy sex scenes, all of which serve only to return our narrator to the primal scene of his devotion. Meanwhile, the furniture restorer’s sentences continue to combine physical breathlessness with emotional abruptness, spiking the slow-motion strangeness of their locations and encounters with an almost lascivious instinct for outrage. Imagine Ronald Firbank, but filmed by John Waters; Saki, but channelled by Gary Indiana.

One of Koestenbaum’s trademark fascinations has always been with people’s names; like Dickens, he loves an oddly memorable christening. However, in this book, amid a multitude of idiosyncratically named characters, the key figures of the lover and his rabbi remain conspicuously nameless; just as in the title, they are only ever pronouns.

The whirlwind invention of the last 20 pages reveals why. As it turns out, the book isn’t really about the maddening elusiveness of an individual body; in a final, fugue-like recapitulation, the narrator’s obsessive desire to understand or unravel his beloved morphs into a gloriously original evocation of the unknowability of any object of desire, and – beyond that – a vision of what it might feel like to admit to the inability of love to triumph over death.

But there’s no need to grit your teeth and hope to make it to the end; for the whole of his 188 chapters, Koestenbaum writes like the best kind of angel, one who is resolutely unafraid of coming down to earth. I hope that knowingly provocative title encourages more people to risk their first encounter with this inimitable and deeply serious writer.

While watching University Challenge or Only Connect, the impulse to shout out the answers comes down to a simple “human urge”, says publisher Richard Green.

That compulsion to “know useless trivia or show off knowledge” has been noticed by the publishing industry, which has met the desire by coming up with a range of products that resulted in quiz and trivia books having a bumper year in 2025, the best since records began in 1998.

The category saw a 24% increase in sales value compared with 2024, according to figures from NielsenIQ BookData. Puzzles sales volume, meanwhile, is up 91% since 2019. This comes amid a broader decline in nonfiction sales, which fell to their lowest level since 2014, representing a 6% year on year decrease.

Publishers suggest that part of the appetite for quizzes and puzzles is a sign of the times. It’s “good old-fashioned escapism” from a “relentless” news cycle, says Green, who at Quarto publishes titles including Wordle Challenge, one of the top sellers in the category last year, based on the New York Times game.

In challenging times, solving problems in the form of puzzles is “fun and therapeutic”, says Stephanie Duncan, editorial director at Transworld, publisher of The 1% Club Quiz Book, which topped the quiz category last year, selling 166,000 copies (a second book sold 106,000, with a third due in November).

Buyers are also looking for an “alternative to screen time”, says Tim Clare, author of books including The Game Changers. There is something to be said for “single-serving” media, he says, as you can’t check your work email or social media via a physical book.

Part of the spike may trace back to the “unparalleled growth” of the board game industry during lockdown, he adds. Many people also got into sudoku, jigsaws and cryptic crosswords during that time. And then came the book Murdle, a popular murder mystery logic puzzle, published in 2023, which continues to be a “big mover” in the space. It sold 115,000 copies last year alone, not counting the sales of its many iterations.

Beyond consumer taste for quizzes and puzzles, there has also simply been “people willing to write them, and writing good ones”, says Clare.

Meanwhile, Waterstones has “completely changed” how it thinks about games over the past six years, according to Clare. There is a growing understanding of the “huge crossover” between readers and gamers. “You are leaving money on the table as a book retailer if you don’t cater to that audience with books that either are about games or include games.”

Social media has also helped make games, such as cryptic crosswords, more accessible, with explainer channels breaking down challenging clues so that cryptics are no longer “this ivory tower impenetrable sort of shadow magic”.

Many quiz and game books are spin-offs from hugely popular podcasts and shows, including The Rest Is Quiz and The Official Race Across the World Puzzle Book. “People want to be more engaged with formats these days, rather than being a passive viewer,” says David Bodycombe, producer of Lateral with Tom Scott, which also has an accompanying book.

Nonfiction sales did not fare well last year, with a 5% fall in sales value compared with 2024. “It’s a real struggle, the market’s difficult,” says Green, who publishes narrative nonfiction along with quiz books. However, “it’s not necessarily all doom and gloom, it’s all part of the publishing cycle”.

Reader demand for true stories “remains as strong as ever”, says Sara Cywinski, nonfiction publisher at Pan, which published The Rest Is Quiz book. Duncan agrees: Transworld is apparently not seeing a decline in nonfiction, and she points to a number of recent bestsellers – Nobody’s Girl by Virginia Giuffre, A Hymn to Life by Gisèle Pelicot and Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams.

However, Cywinski says that our habits are changing. “While physical nonfiction books have seen a dip in sales, the audio format is surging, largely because it can fit more easily into people’s lives.” She points to the “massive success” of the audiobook version of Careless People, Wynn-Williams’ whistleblowing account of her time at Facebook.

Now that many essayists and journalists are publishing directly to subscribers on Substack, work that might have been released as a book is coming out serially, explains Clare. YouTube video essays and podcasts are also popular alternative platforms. “I don’t think these are bad forms of media,” he says, “but my heart is in the nonfiction book.”

Set in the early 1960s, The Daffodil Days tells the story of a couple who move from London to the countryside, have a second child and attempt to settle there, but then, their marriage in tatters, move away again. Instead of describing the couple directly we glimpse them through the eyes of the people around them, from the village doctor, their charlady and various neighbours, to friends, colleagues and visitors, offering the reader vignettes drawn from varying distances and perspectives. Although it is not mentioned in the book’s jacket copy, the couple in question are Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes; eight weeks after the period described in the novel, Plath, having returned to London, would take her own life.

During their time in Devon, from 1961–2, Plath completed The Bell Jar, gave birth to a son, Nicholas, at home, and wrote the poems that would be posthumously published as Ariel; Hughes began his affair with Assia Wevill, which Plath quickly discovered. Given that the couple’s lives provide the source material for an entire cottage industry, you would be forgiven for thinking that there was little left to say about their time in Devon that has not already been said; but by coming at its subject from the viewpoints of others, this virtuoso, deeply researched and utterly convincing debut achieves something quite extraordinary. At points, the experience of reading it feels very close to time travel: Yes, you think, as you watch Plath sitting with her daughter Frieda on her lap in the garden, or having her thumb stitched up by the local GP, or glimpse her getting up to write at 4am: that is just how it must have been.

The injured thumb, of course, inspired her poem Cut, and we see her testing out some of its images and metaphors on Dr Webb (“A flap like a hat, / Dead white. / Then that plush”). Here, too, is the camel-coloured suit she described in a letter to her mother, and which can be seen in photos of her taken in autumn 1962: having found nothing at the local ladies’ boutique, Bain has the shop assistant tell her to try Jaeger in Exeter. Here is the concrete floor that stubbornly wouldn’t dry, and the Bendix washing machine Plath was so pleased with; here is her trip to Broadcasting House to record her essay A Comparison for radio. We meet her friends Clarissa Roche, Al Alvarez, and Marvin and Kathy Kane, and glimpse Plath and Hughes’s famously difficult friendship with Dido and William Merwin – including a retelling of the infamous incident in which a pregnant Plath apparently polished off lunch for four people. In Bain’s hands it’s neither thoughtless, selfish nor “Pantagruelian” (Dido’s word), but a mischievous and deliberate act of revenge.

Structuring a novel so that its story is told through multiple narrators presents significant technical difficulties. Not only must each character have a different voice – something Bain largely achieves – but they must possess their own interiority, too, each drawn clearly enough for the reader to remember who they are when they re-encounter them in a subsequent chapter, and through other eyes. To control what each narrator reveals of the novel’s central thread requires the writer to steer a careful path: make the “plot” (Sylvia and Ted’s collapsing marriage) too important to all the characters and the result will feel stagey and overly managed, but make it too peripheral to their lives and all pace and tension are lost.

But on top of these challenges Bain adds another: she tells the story backwards, beginning in December 1962 with Plath and Hughes’s house, Court Green in North Tawton, being packed up after their separate departures, and ending with the two of them in France in July 1961, looking ahead to their move to Devon. Although the reason for this is perhaps understandable – to roll back the events that led so devastatingly to Plath’s death and see how and where the rot crept in; to close with the two of them happy and optimistic – it significantly impacts the pace of the novel, stripping it of forward propulsion, and layers on difficulties for readers already working hard to discern the shape of events through multiple viewpoints. The book might have proved a little more accessible – especially to readers unversed in Plath’s biography – either told forwards through multiple voices, or backwards via a single, omniscient point of view.

Despite this, The Daffodil Days is an astonishing achievement, its prose supple and intelligent and exact. Bain’s research has clearly been exhaustive – not just concerning Plath and Hughes’s lives but matters such as bellringing, surgery, shop work, the making of honey, sound recording for broadcast – yet her findings are given over to the service of her characters, making each of their worlds believable without the smell of the lamp. The pleasure this kind of writing produces is not quite enough to make the book work without some biographical knowledge of its two central characters, but for those readers unfamiliar with Plath’s last months a little online research is not a great deal to ask.

In a 1993 piece for the New Yorker, quoting the critic George Steiner, the great literary journalist Janet Malcolm wrote, “How the child, ‘plump and golden in America’, became the woman, thin and white in Europe, who wrote poems like Lady Lazarus and Daddy and Edge, remains an enigma of literary history.” This ambitious and insightful novel is a very convincing reply.

Every January, thousands of readers log on to Goodreads, Instagram or TikTok and make the same declaration: this is the year I read 50 books. Or 75. Or 100. Screenshots of spreadsheets circulate, templates for tracking pages and percentages are downloaded, friends publicly pledge to “do better” than they did last year. What was once a private pastime is announced, quantified and, in some corners of the internet, judged.

The appeal is obvious: in a distracted age, reading can easily become crowded out by work, screens and fatigue. Literacy rates in the UK are stagnating: in 2024, around 50% of UK adults read regularly for pleasure, down from 58% in 2015.

As the UK launches its National Year of Reading, a steady drumbeat of commentary has framed the decline of book culture as a civilisational crisis. Columnists have painted lurid pictures of a post-literate society, in which the shrinking cultural centrality of books represents a slow unravelling of the habits that once underpinned modern public life. In this context, reading targets promise discipline and a sense of progress.

But do yearly reading goals actually help us read better, or do they risk hollowing out the very activity they claim to protect? As reading is increasingly tracked and performed online, there is a growing sense that a solitary pleasure is being reshaped by the logic of metrics and visibility. In a culture that counts steps, optimises sleep and gamifies meditation, the pressure to quantify reading may say less about books than about a wider urge to turn even our leisure into something measurable and, ultimately, competitive.

For Ayesha Chaudhry, who co-runs the Instagram account @between2books, this online book culture has become alienating. “The numbers I see online are wildly unsustainable,” she says. “I used to set huge targets – 70 or 100 books a year, written out in my diary. Then I’d get to December, feel guilty, and stare at all these empty spaces on the page.”

Last year, Chaudhry decided to purposely slow down, reading just 10 books – the fewest since childhood – and considers it one of her most satisfying reading years. “I actually sat with what I was reading, and also turned it into something more interactive,” she says. “Most of those books came into my life through conversations, recommendations from people I met on holiday, or listening to an author at an event. They became social experiences rather than items to tick off.”

The shift, she says, has eased both pressure and overconsumption. “I was buying books to meet goals, then feeling anxious because they weren’t read. It became a loop.” Now, her aims are non-numerical: exploring authors’ backlist titles, genres outside her comfort zone, and more time spent thinking rather than counting.

According to philosopher C Thi Nguyen, author of The Score, the phenomenon Chaudhry describes sits within a much wider cultural shift. In his book, Nguyen explores how modern life increasingly gamifies ordinary activities, showing how metrics and scoring systems can distort our experience of what we value.

“Gamification is when you take a natural activity, such as reading or communication, and explicitly apply game-like design features – scores, levels, streaks – to motivate people,” he says. The danger, Nguyen argues, is “value capture”: the moment when rich, complex experiences are flattened into numbers that begin to stand in for meaning.

“It’s very hard to share something like ‘this book changed me’ in a way that’s publicly accountable,” he says. “But it’s extremely easy to share that you’ve read 100 books. So the number becomes a kind of social currency – even though it doesn’t track what mattered.”

From step counts and calorie trackers to follower numbers and productivity dashboards, modern life increasingly rewards what can be measured and compared. “Large-scale data systems are built around what’s easy to count, not what’s genuinely important,” Nguyen says. “Curiosity, delight and genuine meaning cannot survive translation into a spreadsheet.”

That is not to say that voracious reading is always fuelled by an unhealthy desire for self-optimisation. Ella Risbridger, author of In Love With Love, represents the opposite extreme. Last year, she read more than 1,000 romance novels while researching her book, but deliberately refuses to track them. “I try to avoid anything that makes reading feel like maths,” she says. “Reading is where I go to escape targets.”

Journalist and author Afua Hirsch’s experience also illustrates this tension. As a judge for major literary prizes, she has spent years reading under intense deadlines. “When I was judging the Booker, I had to read about 150 books in five months,” she says. “It was literally a book a day.”

Hirsch describes this kind of reading as both a privilege and a strain. “Your brain becomes like a computer. You’re processing, and that’s stressful, especially when something is beautifully written and you want to linger.” After such intense periods, she often needs time to relearn how to read for pleasure.

Nguyen is careful not to dismiss metrics altogether. Used lightly, he says in his book, scoring systems can be useful, giving people a clear goal and immediate feedback. After all, we are in a moment of genuine concern about literacy. With reading levels falling among children and attention spans fraying across all ages, numerical goals can be the first step on the ladder. “Metrics can help people get started,” he says. “But ideally, they’re temporary scaffolding. You need to develop your own reasons to read.”

Reader tracking platform StoryGraph, the fastest-growing rival to Amazon-owned Goodreads, was built in conscious opposition to the competitive reading culture increasingly fostered online. Founded by Nadia Odunayo, the platform positions itself as reader-first, data-light and deliberately flexible.

“Before I built the product, I spent months just watching Bookstagram,” Odunayo says. “A lot of people were stressed by social media and the sense that reading was a competition. I didn’t want to build something people would burn out from.”

Instead of focusing solely on the number of books completed, StoryGraph allows users to set page goals, time goals, or habit-based challenges. Page goals avoid incentivising short books, Odunayo says, and allow for books abandoned partway through. “If you read 50 pages, that effort matters,” she says. “You’re not punished for curiosity, or for reading War and Peace.”

The platform also foregrounds non-numerical challenges: reading across cultures, genres or identities; working through prize shortlists; only reading books already owned. Many are open-ended, deliberately resisting the pressure of annual completion. “You could be doing these challenges for the rest of your reading life,” Odunayo says.

The tension is clear: reading goals promise incentives in an era of distraction, but they also risk importing the logic of productivity into one of the few remaining spaces of offline pleasure. As Nguyen puts it: “Reading goals can be good starters, but if the number remains the reason you read, something has gone wrong.”

Running the numbers

Authors, a bookseller, an influencer and a librarian tally their 2025 reads

Derek Owusu author: 38 books
I didn’t read a book until I was 24. When I discovered reading, it was for pure pleasure. I read at my own pace and reread freely. I don’t usually track the number of books I’ve read, and even worrying about whether I’ve read “enough” irritates me. If I’ve read five books, who cares? I’m baffled by people being impressed or unimpressed by reading totals.

The only goal I set is if I really like an author, I’ll read their back catalogue. I don’t count how many books there are, I just keep going until I get tired. I want to improve as a writer, so I read with that in mind too. But when I’m writing it’s also paradoxically harder to read at all, because I become tunnel-visioned and I don’t want to accidentally plagiarise anything.

Rereading is a big part of how I read too. People say you can’t judge an album after one listen, but a book gets one read and a definitive verdict. Nabokov said: “One cannot read a book: one can only reread it.” The first time, you learn the texture; the second time, you see the craft.

My opinions change with every reread. Last year, I reread The Fall by Albert Camus and thought, “Why did I love this so much the first time?” It’s probably because I was in my early 20s and very angsty. I reread F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby every year: last year I didn’t like it much; this year I thought it was amazing.

Chrissy Ryan bookseller at BookBar: 145 books
Last year was the first time I set a reading goal: 100 books. I thought it was achievable and would keep me focused, especially if I hit a reading rut. When you work in books, a rut can spiral into, “Do I not love books any more? What if I can never read again and this is my whole career?” The goal helped, but only because I made a rule: if I started stressing about numbers, I’d stop.

Owning BookBar has changed how I read. I’m usually buying three to six months ahead, and I try to read as much as possible in that window to know what I’m stocking. If a book is pitched as “big and buzzy” and I’ve read it and didn’t enjoy it, I might not buy it. Conversely, sometimes I miss a book and read it later, such as The Correspondent by Virginia Evans – I wish I’d caught it earlier because I loved it and it sold really well.

Some of my favourite books I read last year (which are actually coming out this year) are I Want You to Be Happy by Jem Calder and Frida Slattery As Herself by Ana Kinsella.

Reading is pleasure and work for me. As a bookshop, you’re taste-making: you’re saying, “We endorse this.” That creates pressure, which can become suffocating. So, in December I stopped reading ahead and read purely for pleasure, and it reminded me why I love it. I’m trying to return to classics and older books more this year too, because having a greater understanding of literary context makes me a better bookseller.

Jack Edwards book influencer with 1.5 million followers across Instagram and TikTok: 137 books
I set reading goals that feel achievable. Last year, my goal was 100 books and I read 137. The point isn’t competition; it’s noticing how I spend my time. How much did I read last week versus how much time did I spend on my phone? The latter becomes about how you’re perceived; it turns toxic.

One of the ways I’ve managed to build a career out of this is by gamifying it – I realised that numbers make things more clickable: it’s the reason people love listicles, that number is satisfying to us. But, for me, reading has always been something I really enjoy, and you have to make sure you’re only competing with yourself rather than doing it for other people.

I think of reading like going to the gym: you train endurance and strength. It’s not just how long you read, but how long you can sustain focus and critical thought. The brain is a muscle, you build it over time.

I’m naturally a slow reader and I like lingering over books. I read with a pen in hand, underlining and marking passages. If someone pulls a book off my shelf, the markings show my path through it. The book tells the author’s story, but it also tells the story of me reading it.

Two of my favourite books I read last year were Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte, which I thought was such a fun exploration of internet culture and the loneliness epidemic, and Gunk by Saba Sams, an amazing novel set in a nightclub in Brighton about an unconventional family dynamic.

My goals now are mostly non-numerical. After studying English literature, I realised how narrow the canon can be, so I prioritised literature in translation, and I fell in love with Argentinian horror and Japanese and Korean micro-studies of character. This year, I’m reading more African writers and exploring the continent’s literary heritage.

Olivia Young-Thompson librarian: 45 books
Last year, I read about two or three books a month, but I didn’t set a target. I also started writing my own book, and when I’m writing I find it hard to read much. One hobby replaced another for a while, and that’s fine.

My reading was a mix: tiny charity-shop paperbacks, big novels, classics and “fluff”. My favourite books from last year included Katherine Arden’s Winternight trilogy, which I loved because it felt cold and wintry during a hot summer, and also some nonfiction, particularly Sharon Blackie’s If Women Rose Rooted.

Working as a librarian, I actually don’t feel huge pressure to read hundreds of books, though it helps to know about the prize winners, as that’s what people often come in looking for your thoughts about.

Some people read 100 books a year, and if you can do that, wonderful. But if you can’t, you shouldn’t be seen as any less of a reader. I think the competitive side of reading mostly exists online.

There’s also a difference between racing through novellas and spending weeks with War and Peace. I hate fast fashion and fast anything, and I’m scared books are starting to fall into that category too. I’ve gone back to rereading books I loved as a child – it’s like re-listening to a favourite album. Forgoing that pleasure just to add another number to a tally feels pointless.

Jan Carson author: 300 books
I read for about four hours a day. It can sound shocking, but reading is my job. That time includes reading for pleasure, for content that I’m teaching my students, articles I’m writing and proofs I’ve been sent.

I don’t read in four-hour chunks. I break it into an hour in the morning, an hour in bed, and I read on the treadmill or exercise bike. I keep a book in my bag, so if someone’s late for coffee or I’m stuck on a bus, I read, which pulls me away from doomscrolling. Short stories are perfect for those small windows of time.

I keep a semi-private Instagram to track what I’ve read, but it’s just for me really. A lot of my goals are non‑numerical – for example, this will be my seventh year of reading an author’s entire canon in chronological order. That doesn’t have to be an overwhelming goal: in 2020, I did Agatha Christie, which was a lot of books, but for Toni Morrison it was only 11. You see writers grow into their voice, which is heartening in a publishing culture that venerates the perfect debut.

My favourite books last year were Sarah Perry’s Death of an Ordinary Man and Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection. I try to read across genres and I’m not a snob about what I read, either. Some authors slow you down and reward attention, such as Marilynne Robinson and Hilary Mantel. I’m also drawn to older writers such as Iris Murdoch and Margaret Drabble; the sentences move at a different rhythm. I spend a lot of time talking about books with friends – I love that communal argument and exchange.

Last night, the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, announced a £27.5m package for libraries. It’s the latest in a string of reading-focused government initiatives, the flagship being the education department’s National Year of Reading 2026, which kicked off last week with an event at the Emirates Stadium in London.

The Year of Reading campaign comes on the back of research by the National Literacy Trust (NLT), which found reading enjoyment among children and young people is at its lowest recorded level, with just one in three of those aged eight to 18 now reporting enjoying reading “very much” or “quite a lot”.

The year-long campaign aims to work with schools, communities, libraries and early years settings to boost reading for pleasure and, in doing so, “give kids the best start in life”.

Other plans are in the works too. In September, Rachel Reeves pledged that every state primary school in England will have a library by the end of this parliament. In late November, an inquiry into reading for pleasure was launched. Non-government schemes are also under way, with the Children’s Booker prize launched in October.

“It’s about making reading seem as natural and everyday as breathing,” says Noughts & Crosses author and former children’s laureate Malorie Blackman, who is among a star-studded list of ambassadors for the Year of Reading campaign. “Reading is so important for understanding the world around you. It’s very easy to become laser-focused on just your own experiences, but reading gives you a way of expanding your horizons, learning about other people and other ways of thinking and feeling and doing. We’re in danger of losing that ability to connect and communicate.”

As a child, it was access to a local library that first sparked Blackman’s love of reading. “I used to live in my local library. I didn’t actually go into a bookshop until I was 14, because I couldn’t afford the books,” she says. “Having a public library within walking distance, and the revelation that I could read any and all of the books, made me who I am.”

This is the third National Year of Reading campaign, after earlier iterations in 1998 and 2008. But as the first in the era of widespread smartphone use and streaming, the campaign will focus on all forms of reading material – something Blackman is passionate about.

“I think reading has got a reputation for being this overly worthy, solitary activity, and it so isn’t,” she says. “There are so many types of reading you can do. There’s nothing wrong with, for example, reading graphic novels or comic books. If you’re into cars or motorbikes or whatever it might be – whatever hobby or pastime – you can get more out of it if you read about it.”

Reading “doesn’t seem to offer the immediate social rewards that motivate us today,” says Jonathan Douglas, chief executive of the NLT, which is helping the government deliver the campaign. “It’s seen as slow, solitary, and studious in a world that values speed, status and spectacle.”

The DfE is encouraging parents to “lead by example” when it comes to reading habits, and to read with their children. “Shared reading in the very early years is the most impactful way to build a lifelong love for reading,” says Julie Hayward, director of partnerships for BookTrust, one of the campaign partners. Reading with children under six also helps with self-regulation, empathy and bonding.

Hayward acknowledges that access to reading is not a level playing field. Barriers parents might face in reading with their children include having had a “negative kind of educational journey” or “low confidence in their own literacy levels”.

The campaign approach is key, adds Hayward. “We shouldn’t be judgmental or preachy. It should be fun and joyful.” The 2026 campaign “focuses on appeal, not duty, and highlights the immediate rewards of reading, making it feel relevant, exciting and rewarding right now, not just in the future,” says Douglas.

While the focus on enjoyment makes intuitive sense, studies on childhood reading suggest it could be overly narrow.

Research by Sabine Little, a senior language education lecturer at the University of Sheffield, found that multilingual children spend more time reading for pleasure than monolingual children, and read a wider variety of texts and formats.

Multilingual children typically think about the importance of reading in a broader range of ways, explains Little. When she asked multilingual children she worked with to list three things they had read that were important to them, there were “very, very few” books that were included “because of the plot or because they were favourites. It was much more to do with the connections that the books facilitated” – for example, “the first book read in a new country, the book that introduced them to a new hobby”.

One child cited racehorse listings in Hungarian, because he read those with his grandmother when he was visiting Hungary. Little believes we can learn from the way multilingual children forge connections to books and apply this with monolingual children too. Validating reading material that holds importance to them in different ways would help create a better culture around reading.

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For Hayward, the newly launched Children’s Booker prize is a huge step forward. The first winner will be announced in early 2027, with £50,000 awarded for the best fiction for readers aged eight to 12, decided by a mixed panel of adult and child judges. The Booker prize foundation will also give 30,000 copies of shortlisted and winning books to children each year.

While more attention for children’s books is always positive, Steven Pryse, who co-owns the independent children’s bookshop Pickled Pepper Books in north London, is sceptical about the prize’s impact. “The children’s book award scene is crowded, and I’m not convinced the Children’s Booker will make much of a difference.”

There is “a fear as well that the prize might pick up on literary books rather than stuff that is more accessible, which, for me, might be a bit of a danger, with things becoming a little hierarchical.”

However, Little says the prize will create a good opportunity for children to discuss reading in the way they discuss games, television and social media. “One of the things children enjoy doing is speaking about books to their peers.” She is “super excited” that the new prize will include books in translation and has the potential to show that books from different cultures and originally written in languages other than English are a valuable part of British children’s literature.

“It’s important for the authors and the publishing houses, but it’s especially important for children”, explains Hayward, “to have great books that are really exciting and engaging, that they can see themselves in.” Ultimately, the Children’s Booker and the Year of Reading have the same aim: encouraging children to discover books they’ll enjoy. “Whatever you’re into, there are books out there for you,” says Blackman. “When people say to me that they don’t like reading, I always say to them: you just haven’t found the right book yet.”

5 tips to get children reading

Make it fun
“We’re surrounded by words and stories all the time – read the adverts on the bus or on billboards together,” says Pryse. “Reading doesn’t have to always mean a book – try reading a recipe together, or making up a story based on your shopping list.”

Create a relaxed environment
Little encourages parents not to panic if there is a period when their child isn’t reading as much, adding that the more you push children, the more you create a pressurised environment around reading.

Share stories early
“Share stories in the early years, so when children get into school, it doesn’t all become about homework,” says Hayward.

Read yourself
“Let your kids see you reading, even if it’s a magazine or newspaper,” says Pryse. “Why not revisit some classics from your own childhood and share them with them.”

Let them read what they want
“Let children gravitate to the books that capture their interest, even if they seem ‘lightweight’,” says Sarah Satha, who co-founded Inclusive Books for Children (IBC). “Supplement these with award shortlists – Carnegie, Booker, The Week Junior or IBC awards – and don’t be afraid to experiment with genres, formats, and reading levels until you find what hooks them in.”

Leah Williamson, Michael Morpurgo, Julia Donaldson and Richard Osman are among those who have thrown their weight behind a new nationwide push to get people reading for pleasure, as the government and the National Literacy Trust launch the National Year of Reading.

The year-long campaign, called Go All In, aims to reverse what organisers describe as a “worrying decline” in reading enjoyment among children and young people. Just one in three 8- to 18-year-olds now say they enjoy reading in their spare time. Only 26% of boys read for pleasure, compared to 39% of girls. More than a quarter of children are leaving primary school having not reached the reading age of an 11-year-old.

Unveiled on Tuesday at Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium, the campaign brings together schools, families, libraries, businesses and cultural organisations, alongside a high-profile group of ambassadors including captain of the England women’s football team Williamson, authors Osman and Cressida Cowell, musician and writer George the Poet, and actor Paterson Joseph, among others.

Launching the initiative, the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, said reading had been central to her own childhood. “Some of my happiest childhood memories are of reading with my grandad, getting lost in The Chronicles of Narnia together,” she said. “I want every child to feel that same joy, whether their passion is football, fantasy, or physics.”

Phillipson described reversing the decline in reading for pleasure as “a national mission”, adding: “Through the National Year of Reading and our Plan for Change we are making sure every child and young person has access to a wide range of books.” She urged families to “read together for just 10 minutes a day”.

The campaign encourages people to read about what they already love, in whatever format suits them, including novels, comics, blogs or audiobooks.

“Pick up a book, listen to an audiobook, get stuck into articles on whatever you love,” said Williamson. “It all counts.”

Osman said he was proud to support the National Year of Reading 2026, adding: “in an increasingly noisy, complicated world, reading is our quiet superpower.”

Jonathan Douglas, chief executive of the National Literacy Trust, said the campaign offered “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reinvigorate the UK’s relationship with reading and change people’s life stories”. He added: “Whether it’s a baby experiencing the magic of a picture book for the first time … or an adult reading the football pages on their commute, reading is for everyone.”

The initiative builds on existing government measures – including a new mandatory reading test for all pupils in year 8, a £5m investment to support reading in secondary schools, and a £10m investment to make sure every primary school in England has a library by the end of this parliament – and will feature national events, local activities and a drive to recruit 100,000 literacy volunteers across the UK.