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Library e-bulletin June 2025 |
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See Myself in Books event at Stoller Hall in Manchester with Dapo Adeola, Maisie Chan and Nathan Bryon. Photo Credit: Mark Waugh
Read Manchester Spring Newsletter 2025
Welcome to the Spring edition of the Read Manchester newsletter. We have been trying out some new ideas – our See Myself in Books inaugural festival, and our Break Time collections – plus returning to some old favourites, the Summer Reading Challenge and our Transition Reads. Find out more below and read about Manchester Libraries’ exciting award win too.
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See Myself in Books Festival
This March saw the inaugural See Myself in Books Festival take place at schools, libraries and other brilliant venues across the city. Building on our See Myself in Books ethnic diversity and neurodiversity themed collections, the festival brought 15 amazing authors to Manchester to inspire children and families with a range of events and activities. Authors, including Maisie Chan, Dapo Adeola and Nathan Bryon entertained children while championing the importance of representation in books. During the two-week festival, 3,469 children met an author at one of our 32 events!
You can find out more, read some of the festival feedback and find our resources for teachers on the library blog.
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Break Time
In 2024 Read Manchester gifted an incredible 80,800 books to children and families in the city. We work with some amazing partners to help us do this, and this June we’re celebrating Thank a Teacher Day by offering our local schools a Break Time Book Collection. Teachers champion reading every day with their pupils, but our collections of 25 books for staff rooms are a reminder of the benefits of #Take10toRead for everyone. We’re inviting schools to use the books for book swaps, a workplace bookshelf or book chat with a cuppa! To date, 75 schools have applied to take a book break with us.
You can find out more about our Take 10 to Read campaign and the benefits of reading for mental health and wellbeing here.
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Early Years
We are committed to supporting Early Years children and their families across the city. Once again, we are gifting an Early Years Transition Read book to all Manchester children moving up to Reception in September. This year we have a beautiful picture book by Shane Hegarty – The One and Only You. Childminders, nurseries and Children’s Centre outreach workers will also be receiving the book and using this within their settings. To accompany this there is also a leaflet on starting Reception and a Take 10 parents’ guide on tips for sharing books with children.
We are also supporting childminders by gifting them books to share with the children that they look after. So far, we've gifted a set of 20 books to 77 childminders (a total of 1540 books!).
In Gorton and Abbey Hey, one of Read Manchester’s target wards, we have established new partnerships with community organisations, early years settings and schools and built on existing relationships developed through the Start for Life programme. We now have six early years Literacy Champions delivering work in the area. Literacy Champions are trusted members of the community who help us to amplify key messages and support families. This forms part of our Worwin funded systems change activity in the area through the Early Words Matter campaign.
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Look for a Book with Festival of Libraries
We had great fun hiding 50 copies of Dame Maggie Aderin-Pocock's book, Am I Made of Stardust? in May. Literacy Champions and the ReadMCR team hid books in all 22 public libraries in the city, as well as in parks, cultural venues and Little Free Libraries. Staff member Tom even cycled 30 miles to ensure the books were out in time for families to begin their search and met some great people on the way! Look for A Book is part of the Festival of Libraries, led by Manchester City of Literature.
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Summer Reading Challenge, Story Garden
We’re really excited to be supporting Manchester Libraries with the Summer Reading Challenge again this year. The theme is a brilliant one – Story Garden – and no doubt you’ll see us out and about encouraging children to join the challenge to read 6 library books during the school holidays. The Challenge is designed to help children maintain their skills during the break and so avoid the ‘summer slide’ where children forget some of what they have learnt in school the previous year. The illustrations for Story Garden have been created by the brilliant Dapo Adeola, who is one of the authors/illustrators on our See Myself in Books list.
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Manchester Libraries win prestigious Library of the Year award
It’s big news from the library world as Manchester Libraries has won the Library of the Year award at the prestigious British Book Awards! Manchester went to the glittering award ceremony as North-West regional winners, but bagged the award (known as a Nibbie) for their Blue Peter Book Club Live programme. You can read more about it on the library blog.
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Celebrating our Literacy Champions in Volunteers’ Week
We recently celebrated national Volunteers’ Week to say a huge thank you to our Literacy Champions. Our network of ‘Lit Champs’ support us in so many different ways – it might be supporting us at events, running their own events and activities, or helping us at our book gifting HQ! Last year Lit Champs helped us gift 6,661 books, all with positive chat about how reading helps to change life stories. You can find out more about our Volunteers' Week celebrations on Facebook.
Literacy Champions help us to reach communities we might otherwise struggle to reach and are brilliant advocates for reading. If you're interested in volunteering as a Literacy Champion visit literacytrust.org.uk/volunteer.
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Share this newsletter
If you know someone who would like to get the latest news from Manchester Libraries each month, feel free to forward this newsletter or let them know they can sign up on our website.
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Spotlight on Services
Whether you're a life-long library member or newly signed up, make sure you're using all the free library services available to you. Did you know there's an...
Online catalogue and an app so you can search for and reserve or renew books from anywhere.
Our Online reference library gives you access to free language courses, digital newspapers and magazines, music streaming and business resources.
Free ebooks and audiobooks mean you can download the latest bestsellers to read or listen on any device, there are no overdue charges, they return themselves and they're free to download.
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Support us
Thanks to donations ands grants many of our events and exhibitions in Manchester Libraries are free. You can make a donation in any library or visit Manchester Central Library Development Trust to make a donation or join the Library Lovers scheme.
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