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The LoveReading LitFest, which launched in March this year, has announced it is moving away from a members-only subscription model to become free to view.
Its content will now be accessible to everyone to give "as many adults and children as possible the opportunity to watch the fantastic line-up of authors, and to encourage them to discover the joy of reading for pleasure". The festival is online and runs all year round with new events released every week.
Since launching, the festival has built an archive of more than 100 events that will now be available for free. Authors who have already appeared at the festival include Karin Slaughter, Jack Meggitt-Phillips, Kate Mosse, Rev Richard Coles, Simone Buchholz, Rashmi Sirdeshpande, Christina Sweeney-Baird, Defne Suman and Simon Scarrow.
In September, the festival launched its "Reading Ambassadors" initiative, a series in which children are given the chance to to read and review a recently published book and then speak to the author directly about it for release on the festival website.
Deborah Maclaren, managing director of LoveReading and LoveReading4Kids, and director of LoveReading LitFest, said: “We feel that now is the perfect time to open our doors wider, to be even more accessible to readers everywhere, especially to children and to schools. One of our key points of focus at the start of 2022 will be our ‘Reading For Pleasure’ project, and we will be working very closely with schools in the UK to provide them with a dedicated programme of literacy events and initiatives to help all teachers deliver this vital policy work. The best and simplest way to do this is to remove our paywall and offer all that we do, for free, to everyone.”
LoveReading Litfest will continue to produce and release two new events weekly, plus book recommendations in its "Festival Favourites" series, along with its fortnightly newsletter.