The book comes alive – author visits to schools around Finland

Research has shown that author visits increase the will to read. The visits are a far-reaching and long-term activities to promote literacy. However, author visits ordered from the Finnish Reading Center do not reach all children and young people in Finland, because not all schools, libraries and other entities working with children and young people have the means to order author visits due to expenses. The Lukuliike koulussa-campaign implemented in 2019 showed that schools are very willing to receive a visit. During the campaign, 240 visits and workshops were offered to schools, but we received 800 applications.

In the Book comes alive visits, we are able to offer visits to those schools and target groups that otherwise would not be accessible. The goal of author visits and literacy workshops is to get children and young people to discover different forms of reading and literature and to inspire reading in all language and age groups.

The goal of the Book comes alive visits is to find out how the visits could best support the reading of different target groups and how the author visit concept could be further developed. We collect information about the content of the visits, the workshops and the wishes of the schools. We get valuable information for the development of author visits and new ways to encourage reading. In addition, the goal is to show teachers the importance of fiction as a part as an essential part of school education, and to bring writers and books into a more central part of everyday school life.

The author visits took place during the school year 2021-22.

The project was funded by the Ministry of Education and Culture.