My Favourite Place

 

I managed the My Favourite Place project including the first mass book giveaway as a part of the first Book Week Scotland in 2012 - after having run the My Favourite Place project for Scottish Book Trust as a major reader development project throughout the year.

As part of the book project, I commissioned Michael Palin and Liz Lochhead (career highlight!) to write pieces for the book, alongside other talented established and emerging writers, and 5 Scottish artists created artworks for the book. 

I then worked with radio producer Liz Leonard to create a radio shorts series Women Writers in Scotland - with five emerging women writers who had contributed to the book, showcasing their work on BBC Woman's Hour, the only piece of national BBC radio coverage for Scottish Book Trust's writer development or projects that year.

I also worked in partnership with BBC Scotland Our of Doors programme to run a national campaign to invite the public to submit stories and poems to the book, resulting in a fantastic response. A selection of these stories were broadcast and published in the book, which was given away all over Scotland through a national giveaway during Book Week Scotland. I managed the production of the book, the logistics of delivering 15k copies to locations throughout Scotland and created a distribution network comprising hundreds of partners, ensuring the book was given away in libraries and bookshops across the country, train stations and public transport hubs, ferry terminals, and a whole host of other sites including the venue partners for Book Week Scotland events. 

The image opposite was taken as part of the press launch of Book Week Scotland at Edinburgh Zoo where my colleague the fantastic Helen Croney managed to convince some animals to read the book and this was one of my favourites.

I am very fond of the Liz Lochhead poem Favourite Place which was published in a collection of hers a few years later. It's a heart-breaker.