Shaparak Khorsandi becomes World Book Night ambassador
Stand-up comic and author Shaparak Khorsandi has been announced as one of World Book Night's main ambassadors.
Due to take place this year on Sunday 23rd April, World Book Night is an annual celebration of books organised by The Reading Agency. The initiative started in 2020, during the first national lockdown, when the estimated social media reach of #WorldBookNight and #ReadingHour was 14.3 million.
Khorsandi will be one of the celebrities "inviting the whole nation to join the #ReadingHour (7-8pm)". She will be "spending time with a good book and inviting others to do the same - with an exciting new initiative to get the whole nation reading to be unveiled closer to World Book Night."
She says: "World Book Night is the best night of the year! I'm so excited to be joining the wonderful crew of ambassadors for such an important campaign, celebrating reading, books, readers, and how amazing all of the above are! During Reading Hour, everyone should be grabbing a good book and set some time aside to read, and from the reading list, I've got my eyes on Ayaan Mohamud's You Think You Know Me. So let's all join in the celebrations and get reading!"
Nadiya Hussain, Katie Piper, Fearne Cotton and Louise Pentland are the campaign's other lead ambassadors.
As part of the celebrations, The Reading Agency will be donating over 68,000 books to organisations "where people who don't usually read". This year's 400 recipients include 89 arts organisations and charities, 47 hospitals and health centres, and 39 prisons and young offender institutions.
Karen Napier, CEO of The Reading Agency, says: "We're hugely excited to celebrate World Book Night 2023 with such a fantastic team of ambassadors who are helping us champion the power of reading. We're immensely grateful for the support from authors, publishers, libraries and giveaway organisations for helping people give the gift of reading this spring!"
More information about the initiative - including the World Book Night 2023 titles - can be found at worldbooknight.org