Hay festival president Stephen Fry is backing the organisation’s new campaign to collect recommendations for the most pleasurable books to entice new readers, in a bid to combat falling literacy rates in the UK.
The Pleasure List campaign, run in partnership with the government’s National Year of Reading 2026, will share the “most un-put-downable” reads in the hopes of helping reverse the downward trend of adults reading for pleasure.
The National Year of Reading is “great news for book lovers, but the stats show we’re a dying breed,” said Fry. “Fewer and fewer people in Britain are reading for pleasure and we want to change that.”