A quarter of a million books are due to find new homes tonight, as thousands of book-lovers hit the streets to give away their favourite titles as part of World Book Night.



Over 7,000 people have signed up to be volunteers for the fifth annual mass book giveaway. Each has been given 18 copies of their choice of book from a list of 20 titles, ranging from David Almond’s children’s classic Skellig, to MC Beaton’s crime caper Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death. The 7,300 volunteers set out on Thursday to give their personal armload of books away to the 35% of the population who don’t read for pleasure.

“I am an English teacher who works in an inner-city, all-inclusive secondary school,” wrote one of this year’s volunteers, Charlotte Benson from London, in her application to join the giveaway. “I have seen the degrading effects that a lack of reading or even access to books has on young people. I have also had the pleasure of witnessing that fire of a passion for reading at the very moment it is ignited. Nothing inspires me more than this.”

A further 2,700 institutions, from prisons to hospitals and homeless centres, have also been given a selection of the specially printed books, and will be handing them out. The total number of books printed for the event by its publisher partners numbers 250,000, with Lynda La Plante’s bestselling Prime Suspect jostling for space alongside Rachel Joyce’s hit The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, and James Bowen’s memoir Street Cat Bob, chosen by organisers as well as Booker prize winner Roddy Doyle’s Dead Man Talking. This year’s list includes poetry for the first time, with a collection of Essential Poems edited by Neil Astley.

Volunteers are not the only ones to be giving away books: the organisers of World Book Night are urging as many people as possible to go out and buy their favourite book, and then to give it away to someone in their community, thus “inspiring them to begin their reading journey”.

As well as the giveaway, thousands of events are being held around the UK to mark World Book Night. A flagship celebration of reading in London this evening will see authors including La Plante, Almond and Irvine Welsh telling an audience at the Shaw theatre about the books which inspire them, with other major writers appearing at events around the country. Alexander McCall Smith will be at Edinburgh Central Library, while crime novelist Stella Duffy will be at Woolwich Library in Greenwich, and staff from the British Library are taking to the streets in London and Leeds to hand out books from the library’s series of crime classics, as well as World Book Night titles.

La Plante said it was an “honour” for Prime Suspect to have been chosen as one of the World Book Night titles. “It is wonderfully heartwarming to think that a reader I have never met can be drawn into my story, be introduced to the characters I have created and experience some of the emotions I felt while writing the book. It is quite overwhelming. I hope that all of the chosen books bring huge enjoyment to readers worldwide,” she said.