I left school at sixteen with two GCSEs, a moderately bright kid with loads of family problems: school seemed irrelevant but books always offered escape routes, doors, clear spaces.

 

Later on, as a young single mother, I returned to education, and was lucky to find a great teacher in Brian Nellist in the School of English at the University of Liverpool. I gained a First Class degree and spent three years writing a PhD under Brian's supervision: 'Visionary Realism - from George Eliot to Doris Lessing', mapping out a series of thoughts I've been circling ever since; basically how books give us a way of holding complex and divergent truths.

 

In 1986 I married Philip Davis, a lecturer in the School of English (and now editor of The Reader magazine). His ground-breaking new MA, Reading in Practice, addresses some of the issues that come up for people involved in the Get Into Reading project; and develops a thoughtful literary basis from which new practice may grow.

 

I taught for 15 years in the Department of Continuing Education at Liverpool ,and it was in those classes that I began to develop the read-aloud and personal response model which is at the heart of Get Into Reading.

 

'Literacy' is not just the ability to read - but the state of being a reader. At The Reader Organisation we wish to work to address the sad fact that nearly a quarter of the adult population has difficulties with reading. But our radical approach - 'reading as if for life' as Dickens called it - will remain centred firmly on pleasure, on making the serious pleasure of reading available, in many different ways, to as many people as possible.

 

I want to make a bigger place for books and reading in the heart of the nation, bringing about a Reading Revolution - great books reaching everybody - because, while the other arts do all kinds of wonderful things, only books allow us to fully understand the human experience.