National Year of Reading: what does reading mean to us?
We’re proud to support the National Year of Reading 2026, a UK-wide campaign to address the steep decline in reading amongst children, young people and adults.
This initiative resonates deeply with our commitment at OUP to advance knowledge and learning worldwide. We believe reading is transformative: it fuels curiosity and gives people the chance to ‘go all in’ and learn more about the subjects they care about most. It also supports learning, wellbeing, and opens doors to opportunity.
Our commitment goes beyond the UK. Across continents, we partner with schools, governments, and communities to raise reading attainment and foster a lifelong love of reading.
As reading habits evolve, we embrace both print and digital formats to ensure reading remains inspiring, accessible, and relevant. This year, we’ll share stories and initiatives that show how reading in all its forms can help you ‘go all in’ and unlock more of what you love.
We asked some of our colleagues from across our global offices for their personal reflections about what reading means to them.
Elizabeth Munn
Managing Director, Education
For me, reading is the beginning of possibility. It can open a child’s world, helping them to understand themselves, others, and the environment we all share. Working with OUP’s beautiful children’s books, I’m reminded of the transformative power a single story can hold. Yuval Zommer’s The Wild, for example, shows how words and illustrations can combine to create something magical—a story that not only captivates young readers but inspires them to care about the world around them.
Stories like this demonstrate why reading matters. They prompt children to ask questions, expand their imaginations, and see their place within a much bigger global story. And that’s why our work at OUP feels so meaningful to me: for generations, we’ve supported learners by giving them access to stories that help them grow.
Matt Davidson
Head of International Primary and Curriculum
Reading means the world to me! Personally, I wasn’t a huge reader as a teenager, but at university I discovered a passion for it that even led me toward pursuing a writing career. However, after countless rejection letters and just a few published pieces, I did manage to find my way into publishing. The books I’ve read over the years have exposed me to culture, philosophy, food, travel, true crime—so much! They still enrich me today, even if I reach for a device more often than a book now.
Professionally, reading is at the heart of everything I do. No matter how forward-looking the work I do with our Oxford International Curriculum and Primary resources becomes, it all starts with reading. Research shows strong reading skills and vocabulary knowledge link to future academic and professional success. Therefore, reading, in a way, is a key to children’s opportunities, opening whole new worlds.
Yolandi Farham
Product Director, OUP South Africa
Reading, to me, has always been synonymous with stories and possibility—the possibility to learn, to build knowledge, to imagine boldly, and ultimately to participate fully in the world. Stories connect us. They bridge cultures and generations, nurturing curiosity and shaping young minds.
Yet the power of reading—and the possibilities it unlocks—remains out of reach for far too many children across South Africa and beyond. This is why the work we do at OUP matters so deeply to me.
Through initiatives like our partnership with AVBOB and the Road to Literacy campaign, the Early Grade Reading project, Oxford Reading Buddy, and our wide range of reading schemes, we are helping to close the gap in access to quality reading materials in children’s mother tongue. Just from the Road to Literacy project alone, more than 1,940 trolley libraries have now reached communities that need them most. Each trolley library represents more than books. It represents possibility: the chance for children to encounter stories in their own language, to imagine a future beyond their circumstances, and to step into opportunities that literacy makes possible.
To me, reading is not just a skill. It is the first step in unlocking possibilities.
Calvin Poon
Sales Director, OUP Hong Kong
In an age drowning in information, reading has become my quiet act of resistance—a retreat into silence where meaning can rise to the surface. I seek that space not to escape the world, but to hear voices otherwise lost in the noise.
To read is to meet another mind across the distance of time. As a Hong Konger, I experienced this meeting in a unique way. Our city has always been a place where East and West intertwine, and working in publishing here feels like standing at a crossroads of different souls. I am proud that OUP helps build these bridges—bringing Western voices to Eastern readers, and enriching the conversation between us.
Beyond this connection, reading expands my own world. My direct experience is limited; yet through books, I gain access to lives and places I would never otherwise know.
Kiran Shahnawaz
Senior Product Manager, English & ECCE, OUP Pakistan
Reading was my first way of understanding the world. I grew up reading fiction—Dastan-e-Ameer Hamza, One Thousand and One Nights, Roald Dahl, Beatrix Potter and many more. Through these stories, I travelled long before I ever left home. When I finally began to travel in real life, I realized that no place felt completely strange and no people felt entirely new. Beneath all our differences, we share the same longings—for belonging, kindness, and hope.
That understanding is at the heart of why I love what I do today. My work lets me expand access to reading in a country where so many children —over a third—are under 15, and where stories can help build identity, familiarity, and connection with the world. And to me, that’s the most meaningful part of what we do at Oxford. Through Oxford Big Read and Oxford Reading Buddy, we’re opening doors to a world that values many voices, where everyone can see themselves in the stories we tell.
Angeline Matthews
Editorial Assistant, Academic
What reading means to me has changed quite significantly over time. What was a hobby, entertainment, and an imaginative outlet has grown into a passion, career, and everyday resource. From my childhood mystery story days, to the YA moments of the teens, to classic literature in college—I have since pivoted from fiction alone. I decided I wanted to learn something new as often as posisble, which is what led me to OUP, and exploring nonfiction and academic reading.
Reading does not have one meaning; it has several. It contextualizes the majority of comprehension. Reading is understanding: fiction allows us to make sense of the complexities of the human experience, while research allows us to explore critical thought and gain knowledge wherever we choose to seek it. To me, reading means everything. To me, it encompasses both the necessary and the metaphysical.
Anna Silva
Publicity Manager, Academic
I see reading as both an opportunity to escape, and to engage and connect. A book offers the chance to travel to an Italian coastal village—feel the heat of the summer sun on my upturned face, hear the cicadas in the long grass—when the weather outside the window has failed to deliver. As I read with my children, we visit fantastical words together, and laugh at ridiculous situations, but also meet people far outside the realms of our daily experience. Books offer readers the chance to think across millennia, and to consider the present; to see the parallels and divergences in human experience across time and space. To me, reading is an essential gateway to engaging with the meaning of our lives.
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