Library of Birmingham blog

As part of our 2012 Young Readers Festival I’m lucky enough to be working on an exciting creative reading and writing project with bestselling author Simon Cheshire and 6 Birmingham schools. Between us, we’re co-writing a book that will be launched as part of the ‘festival fortnight’ in June.

The idea is that groups from Kings Norton Girls School, Turves Green Girls School and Technology College, King Edward’s School, Edgbaston, St Thomas Aquinas Secondary School, Arthur Terry School and Bordesley Green Girls School will each write one chapter of the book. Each school will be visited twice by the project team – one week from library staff who will facilitate a ‘story ideas’ session; and then the following week from our author who will help the group write the next chapter in the story. The visits and chapters will be captured on our Great Kindle Relay Project blog and all the schools involved can suggest new characters or plot developments via the comments section of the blog. Because the writing will not be ‘fixed’ until the last chapter, groups can go back to previous chapters and re-draft, tweak or foreshadow – that’s the beauty of using an online space!

Once the book is finished – and we’ve chosen a cover from the ideas uploaded onto our Flickr gallery – it will be published as a print book for each of the schools who took part and as an e-book on Amazon for anyone to download. We’ve given each of the school libraries involved a Kindle e-reader so that they can start testing out e-books and maybe download some free classics that Simon recommends in his book, ‘You’ve Got to Read This!’

If you’re a creative type (or your kids are!) and you’d  like to be involved in Young Readers Festival then you could enter our competition to design the festival T-shirt.  There are  categories for children & young people, and adults with some great prizes to be won.