Among much else across my first twelve months as the Te Awhi Rito Reading Ambassador, I’ve participated in a number of book festivals. I like to think of this work as championing the act of reading, and the powerful charge of narrative, language and ideas in our culture.
But an almighty question hangs over these lively festival gatherings and their stimulating conversations. It hangs, too, over Booksellers NZ. And PANZ. And the Book Awards Trust. And each and every ancillary organisation that contributes to the life of the book in Aotearoa. Who in 10, 20, or 30 years’ time will be the audience for the books our writers create? Who will attend the literary festivals where our writers, and writers from across the world, speak? Who will buy the books our publishers produce and distribute and our booksellers hope to sell?
Serious challenges beggar our current reading ecosystem—increasingly fragile publishing and bookselling prospects; a fragmented infrastructure; a book reviewing and critical culture hanging on by its fingernails; diminished resourcing and much work required of organisations to obtain funding; persistent difficulties bringing NZ books to audience attention; and, I would suggest, the long shadow of settler culture and its legacy of privileging the physical and material over abstract thought and artistic expression. Despite an industry—wide habit of boosterism, the raw truth is that our book ecosystem is on a knife—edge.
But serious though these difficulties are, they constantly occlude that far more fundamental question. Will there be readers, constant or otherwise, in 30 years’ time? The answer to that question is enormously consequential for our social and economic health as a nation.
I’ve always maintained a stubborn confidence in the future of books. Throughout its 2000 year evolution the book has seen off numerous challenges. Despite predictions, even the e-book has been unable to vanquish the printed book. In a careless kind of way, I’ve always assumed there would be readers too – alas, a self—centred projection if ever there was one. The enormous amount of available data on reading tells another story altogether, one that pushes hard against our knee-jerk puffery.
It is that data that led eight years ago to a suite of reading and research initiatives developed by the National Library. These sought to address our reading crisis—and, it is a crisis, with implications largely unacknowledged or spoken about. The resulting projects which developed reading communities and research on reading for pleasure in New Zealand were prompted by decades of international research. The research points firmly to what is needed to establish the habit of lifelong reading for pleasure and, further, what astonishing advantages accrue for individuals and communities where reading cultures are well established. The research also indicated that a public-facing role model can galvanise action around reading decline by building awareness of both reading’s critical role in education and life outcomes and, conversely, what is lost in our culture if reading continues to head south.
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We live in interesting times—by which I mean a time of political fracture and systemic change. If we add to that the changes across the educational landscape and cultural infrastructure of Aotearoa and the rapid encroachment of AI, it seems more important than ever that there is an ongoing public voice for reading advocacy—first and foremost as a medium for pleasure and stimulation, but also, as fortification against societal developments that are surely epistemically compromising for our culture: steeply declining concentration in our young; children’s—and many adults’—shrinking vocabulary; a disturbing growth in anxiety disorders; the assault of pre-digested, misleading information; increasing groupthink; and the decline of critical thinking faculties—at precisely the moment in history we need them most.
The Awhi Rito kaupapa is to advocate for, model, and inspire reading in children, their whānau, families, and communities—in other words, everyone. This advocacy is part of the National Library’s aim to build a nation of readers.
The role is both iterative and cumulative. Our inaugural Te Awhi Rito, writer Ben Brown, emphasised during his tenure the twinned story and language cultures underpinnng reading in Aotearoa; the oral tradition of te ao Māori, and the print tradition of tangata Pākehā; he spoke powerfully about the primary need to sing, recite, share oral story, and read aloud to one’s children. His successor, school librarian Alan Dingley, criss-crossed the country talking to young people, educators and librarians about reading as the doorway to a lifetime of joy, growth, and wisdom.
I continue to build on and amplify Ben and Alan’s messages. But I’m also working to bring the advocacy to areas outside of education: community and sector groups such as yourselves, other service organisations, and the government sectors already involved in helping New Zealander’s lives: local bodies, health, justice, arts and culture, business. Countering our reading decline will require a nationwide collective effort that considers every piece of the reading jigsaw. It’s particularly important that decision makers across all sectors are brought on board.
As an example, I was told at a school library hui last year that school librarians’ greatest anxiety is the prospect of a change in school management. The sustainability of the library environs, the librarian’s job, and book budget, is never guaranteed. And that’s leaving aside the schools where neither books, library, nor librarian exist, and whose students have limited or no access to public library services. Practically speaking, not every school in Aotearoa can provide a library (our country is dotted with small country schools). But ensuring ongoing access to booksfor children within the education system is critical for educational progress.
There are inequities in access to books across our country. If we believe—as the research clearly demonstrates—that reading for pleasure is foundational for true literacy (including digital literacy) and therefore a crucial element in educational and life success; and if we believe that equity of access to reading material is the right of all children, then books in and through schools constitute the vital link in the chain of access. It may be the only consistent access to books and the nurturing of a reading life for many, many children.
We know that reading in Aotearoa begins to taper around nine years and enters a vertiginous decline in teenage years. There are numerous reasons for this, including families and teachers disengaging from reading for pleasure once a child has learned to read alone. In fact, reading aloud and discussing books with children continues to be important well beyond a child’s attainment of basic literacy.
But there is strong evidence that reading has declined over every age group beyond adolescence in the last 15 years. A complex interplay of factors are at work here, including gaping economic disparity, the growing burden of work across all communities; the aforementioned inequities in access to reading matter, the heavy socio-economic demands of parenting and family, a sharp increase in mental health problems.
Then there’s the formidable array of competing leisure alternatives—long form television, video, youtubing, gaming, to name just some; and not least, the advent of the smart phone and its enticements, resulting in the colonisation of sentient humanity! There is a clear correlation between the appearance of the smart phone and global reading for pleasure heading sharply south.
But the reading message also needs to be powerfully communicated to adults who have left reading behind and are now, along with their children, at the mercy of algorithims, rolling news cycles, and an addictive ensorsellment by screens. If we lose adult readers, we lose a very important element of nurturing young readers—the modelling of reading: within families, schools, and beyond. It is certainly true that the literacy tail and reading decline are linked to poverty and inequity of access, but it is also true that families across all income brackets – including those with immense cultural capital—have, for all the cited reasons, allowed reading to slip away.
We know too that reading for pleasure has declined steeply amongst teachers—including English teachers. I’ve lost count of the number of teachers who have readily confessed they rarely read books now because—exhausted by a panoply of daily tasks and cognitive overload, increased numbers of students with learning difficulties and complex emotional needs, and the surging demands of the curriculum—it is so much easier to lose themselves in online scrolling. The same thing is happening with public and school librarians. And these groups are three of the key agents in building cultures of reading amongst young people and their communities.
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What do we do? I’m increasingly persuaded that the mission to rebuild a nation of readers needs to be the basis and driver of a determined pivot in our thinking and activity. I would argue that to achieve the recovery and uplift of our sector, the most persuasive narrative at hand—for decision makers, funders, and the public—is one that makes clear and urgent the signal importance of reading and access to books for thriving individuals and communities; a narrative that spells out the profound—indeed existential—implications for our wider culture, the country’s prosperity, and our very democracy if reading culture is not recovered and strengthened. A wide and deep reading citizenry (as we once rightly considered ourselves) has the capacity to reflect and connect and discern, to think its way cooperatively through problems of inequality and productivity, social fracture and economic complexities, climate crisis and global relations; it is our collective capacity to focus, analyse, reason and act that will build a cohesive, prospering society.
I believe this sector’s best hope is a collective reading activismthat both underpins and leads a rethink and revivification of our book and reading infrastructure. It is the first and critical issue from which all else will follow. Our entire network is predicated on the existence of abundant, ardent readers.
The good news is that we have at hand so much knowledge about how to rebuild a reading culture.
A reading insurgency requires strategic change from a dozen different points of entry including:
- Empowering families and schools through equitable access to books; books in te reo Māori, the languages of tangata moana, and the home languagues of other New Zealanders—books that reflect the lives of all young people in Aotearoa, and books that enlarge their understanding of other people and other worlds
- Building parents and caregivers understanding of reading’s horsepower so they are encouraged to place reading for pleasure at the heart of their children’s life and learning (and bring the adults back to reading themselves)
- Supporting our early education sector and schools to seed and grow reading cultures that provide inspiring role models, that strengthen reading aloud and reading for pleasure in the classroom
- Supporting and strengthening our truly excellent public library systems—whose status and resources are never guaranteed
- Working with government services to grow understanding of reading for pleasure’s contribution to recovery, well-being, and the emotional sustenance of individuals in need
- Supporting publishers to bring forth the books that fuel the reading lives of our children—those books in multiple languages, but also books across a wide variety of forms—poetry, fiction, narrative non-fiction, picture books, graphic story—to feed all reading appetites. A reading life will always encompass multitudes but the acceleration of fast publishing has meant an oversupply of formulaic, arid books for young readers, books crowding out titles that provide challenge and extension alongside immersiveness and delight. We need adventurous, creative, bravepublishing that prods and stimulates our potential readers, not great quantities of formula led by algorithms and the market’s lowest denominators
- We need to encourage booksellers to be similarly adventurous with the reading material they stock—to readand engage imaginatively with their books, and lead readers to them. I recognise publishing and bookselling’s bottom line imperatives loom ever larger, but I think the vexed equations of the book economy have pushed booksellers into ever more conservative decisions around what they stock, and how long they hold that stock. Books, especially lesser known books that ask more of readers, need time to percolate through the community consciousness. Reaching beyond the obvious titles and championing new and older books of enduring quality —particularly for young people—will build a dynamic, nuanced, rich reading culture.
- We must assert a cultural narrative from bottom up and top down that recognises, respects, and champions the essential role the language arts—literature, writing, oratory, poetry, drama—play in a flourishing society
- Above all, we need to argue for that which is foundational to all of this: funding for the component parts of our reading infrastructure. This will be a decisive contributor to building a nation of readers. Clearly, we have a job of work to do in that regard— a fully cohering sector with an insistent collective voice is, I would suggest, our best hope.
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At this fretful moment in history the book sector is more important than it has ever been.There is no easy fix for its dilemmas, but for sure the chance of a turnaround requires the sector to pull together, to have extensive, searching kōrero, to consider how our multiple services can work in more effectivelyjoined-up ways to build a long-term plan for the reading insurgency and sector reorientation.
We need to assert ourselves against the narrative that views the health and wealth of a nation in determinist, mechanistic outputs and economic terms alone. A country is a community of thrumming human possibility that needs the nourishment of language and story to thrive, flex, and imagine a future for all of us.
Meanwhile, in our personal lives, surely all of us can benefit from some hard thinking about our own relationships with reading? How’s that going, here in 2026? If we were to range over our reading lives in the last 15 years, what might we discover? Is long-form reading a vibrant part of our weekly round? Or has screen life muscled its way in and taken up the glass of time, to borrow Anne of Green Gables’ immortal phrase? If the habit of reading books has receded, how might we coax it back?
And how might you energetically advocate, spread the reading message? By engaging with people! —friends, dinner and holiday companions, family across the generations, colleagues—about the power reading has in individual lives and communities, its capacity for rescue and repair in our harried, digital world. Share with your reading life with people—particularly the young; tell them what individual books mean to you.
And suppose those you interact with ask, What exactly is reading for pleasure and what happens when we do it? I think of it as reading motivated by our own desires: for entertainment and comfort and escape, for understanding, stimulation, reflection, and imaginative stretch. It’s the reading that takes place happily alone and immersed, propelled by curiosity, spellbound by story and language. We read to find out. We hoover up narrative that reflects our reality and dreamscapes and throws a light on the lives of others.
Our humanity and our world are both explained and their mysteries productively deepened. Reading for pleasure is both joy and incitement; our enquiries expand, our language bank surges, our empathy is powerfully aroused and sustained. We emerge subtly changed, lit up, creatively disturbed, emboldened by new thinking. We need to tell someone else. We need them to know, we need to connect … And with connection, reading becomes twice powerful – when we connect with others over reading we’re making the first steps in creating a reading community, in watering the seeds of a nation of readers.
A mildly abbreviated version of Kate’s recent speech at the NZ Booksellers conference, republished with kind permission of the author and the National Library.
