Next week is Book Week Scotland. Delivered by The Scottish Book Trust with partner organisations all over Scotland, Book Week Scotland will feature hundreds of events featuring writers and readers across the country. As well as a pop up festival in the Mitchell Library in Glasgow on Saturday 1st December, there will be a live poetry slam broadcast to secondary schools all over the country at 11am on Thursday 29thNovember

My Favourite Place, a book about Scotland’s best-loved places by a variety of people, some famous, some not, including Michael Palin, Alexander McCall Smith and Liz Lochhead will be available, free, from Libraries and bookshops. The book will be available from Shetland Library and in Mareel.

Other events in Shetland will include a project run by Shetland Arts, with multi-award winning poet and former Reader in Residence, Jen Hadfield, which will see bairns from Happy Hansel and Dunrossness Primary Schools reading to service users in Wastview and Overton Lea care centres.

On Friday 30th November, Mareel Café Bar will be the venue for a bookswap between 10am and 5pm. The upper café bar will be designated as the quiet area for the Reading Hour between 11am and 12pm, where people are welcome to come in sit down and relax with a good book and read for an hour and join in with thousands of people across the nation, on trains, in libraries, shops, work places who will all be reading too.

Shetland Arts’ Literature Development Officer, Donald Anderson said: “The benefits of reading are now known to go far beyond simple entertainment or the attainment of knowledge and learning. There is now evidence to show that reading can have a significant impact on people’s mental well being.”

Shetland Arts’ Marketing Officer, Lisa Ward said: “We’d like to encourage everyone to get involved in these events if they can. In particular, we’re welcoming everyone to bring a book or two to Mareel Café Bar and swap it with another book you fancy. Let’s all celebrate Book Week Scotland together!”

Source: Shetland Arts