‘Sometimes you just have to put your money where your mouth is,’ says the Me Before You author, who will fund the charity for three years

Me Before You author Jojo Moyes has stepped in to save Quick Reads, just two weeks after the popular adult literacy scheme announced it was on the brink of closure due to a lack of funding.

Moyes’s donation was not disclosed, but charity the Reading Agency, which runs the scheme, had previously said it would need £120,000 a year for at least three years to keep Quick Reads going. Moyes said her funds would cover that time frame, and that she would help the organisation find future funding thereafter.

Quick Reads adult literacy scheme to close following funding cut Read more

“There’s a political side of me that feels dismayed that it’s down to an individual to keep a scheme that is basically for the public good going. In an ideal world it wouldn’t be me … but we are where we are,” she said. “We live in really difficult times and I felt sometimes you just have to put your money where your mouth is, and this is a cause I believe in.”

Aimed at the one in six adults in the UK with reading difficulties, Quick Reads publishes entertaining, simply written books by well-known writers from Andy McNab to Malala Yousafzai. Launched in 2006, it announced in April that it was preparing to close. Its funding from Mars Galaxy ended in 2016, and from Arts Council England in 2017, and the quest to find money elsewhere had failed.

According to the charity, 95% of literacy practitioners say that Quick Reads has boosted learners’ reading confidence and 91% say the books have directly improved literacy skills.

“As soon as I heard the news I just couldn’t believe it,” said Moyes. “I’d written a Quick Read myself and I’d recently visited a women’s prison, and thought long and hard afterwards about the importance of literacy … how impossible it is ever to get ahead if you don’t have reading skills. You are tethered forever to the bottom rung if you don’t have the ability to just be able to read to a certain level, so it seemed incomprehensible to me that this scheme, which was well run, got great results and had a very low-cost outlay in comparison to a lot of charitable schemes [was shutting down]. At a time when libraries were closing, I thought this was nuts. I talked about it to my husband for a weekend and we thought we’d just put in a few tentative inquiries. And here we are … I am lucky enough to be in a position to help, and proud to provide the support it needs for the next three years.”

The funding from Moyes, whose novel Me Before You has sold 8m copies around the world and was adapted for film in 2016, means that Quick Reads will be able to continue commissioning books, with the next new title to be released in 2020.

The Reading Agency’s chief executive Sue Wilkinson said the charity “couldn’t be more thankful to Jojo for recognising the importance of the scheme and so generously providing the funding to enable it to continue”.

“It was with a heavy heart that we announced the end of Quick Reads last month, after seeking ongoing support for the initiative for 18 months,” said Wilkinson. “The moving testimonies from the public, authors and all of our partners last month demonstrated how much they value these wonderful books and how Quick Reads have touched so many people’s lives. As a charity, we are continually working to secure enough funding to keep our high-quality programmes running and support the 1.4 million people who rely on our work each year, so this is an extraordinary gift.”

Moyes said she would also be more involved with the scheme. “My aim is to give them a three-year window, so hopefully I can encourage other people to support them. My intention is to make publishers take a bigger role as well, because if we don’t feed the seedbed of reading then frankly we’re not going to have readers. It’s in their interest to have this scheme not just survive, but flourish,” she said.