Our main aim of the Torbay Literary Festival is to get more people reading. I was speaking to a primary school teacher recently who told me that it’s extremely common for children to turn up on their first day at school, and on being shown a book, attempt to swipe the pages like an i-pad. Aged four of five, they have never encountered a book before. The benefits of reading are multiple, and I don’t need to spell these out – but aside from the vast benefits to mental health, and development, it offers such pleasure and escapism, I often thinks books should be prescribed on the NHS.
However, it’s not just children who are reading less. Research published in The Sunday Times, last year, stated that 27 million adults in the UK do not read regularly, with 61% of 16–24-year-olds saying they don’t read at all. A separate YouGov survey is bleaker still, finding 40% of Britons haven’t read or listened to a single book in the past year. The proportion of eight-18-year-olds who report reading something in their free time every day has halved in the past two decades, from 38.1 per cent to just 18.7 per cent now. The reasons for this are many-fold, and some very obvious, but you don’t have to be a genius to know that if teenagers don’t read, they turn into adults that don’t read, who then become parents who don’t read, and their children, by turn, never have the example of seeing people reading for pleasure in their home.
I hope that our first festival will encourage those people who used to love it, to return to reading. I know I have listened to book talks in the past from people I didn’t think I’d be particularly interested in and then bought their book on a whim, then become a life-long fan. We can’t change the world, but we can, hopefully reignite a love of books. After all, is there anything better than finding a novel you love, being disappointed when it comes to an end, but then finding out that author has written half a dozen other books.
Ben Tisdall February 2026
