Raymond Antrobus, Cressida Cowell and Michael Morpurgo are among the authors joining growing efforts by publishing industry workers and authors to address the declining rates of young people reading in the UK. The trio were part of an all-staff Hachette UK event ‘Discovery Day’ which took place in Olympic Park on the 5th of June and where Hachette UK and Hachette Book Group CEO, David Shelley, and chair of the Hachette Children’s Group, Hilary Murray Hill, shared the next stages of the company’s campaign to tackle the children’s reading crisis.

Morpurgo and Antrobus attended the event in person while Cowell was part of the video content. The authors talked to 1,000 staff from all Hachette’s UK offices about the power of reading and Hachette’s campaign to address the reading crisis, ‘Raising Readers’ which was launched in December 2024.

This comes on the heels of the National Literacy Trust’s damning survey (one of the partners for Hachette’s staff volunteering scheme) which was touted by the Bookseller as their largest ever. The survey which gathered data from the results of 114, 970 children from age 8 to 18 concluded that young people’s reading enjoyment and daily reading frequency have fallen to their lowest levels since the charity began tracking them 20 years ago with less than a third (32%) saying they enjoyed reading “very much” or “quite a lot” in 2025 – a precipitous 36% drop from 2005.

Of the report, Cowell said: “In my experience, parents and caregivers know that reading is important but not quite how vital it is to children’s life chances, or that early reading together is a crucial foundation. Encouraging children to make reading for pleasure a lifelong habit can feel daunting sometimes, so it’s great that this report shares powerful insights on how to engage young people.”

Morpurgo called for “radical transformation” from government, teachers, booksellers, media and publishers to improve support for fostering a child’s love of reading. He said: “Selective unfairness is incompatible with the aspirations of any enlightened society … Books and stories and poems must be there for all children, for everyone. Access to literature for our children is a right and should be readily available.”

For more information read here and here.