Jeddah: At a small cozy café overlooking the beautiful and calm Red Sea, the Jeddah Reads team is animatedly brainstorming for ideas for their next literary event.
Jeddah Reads is a youth driven non-profit social initiative created to revive and promote reading in the city.
Indian national Huda Merchant founded Jeddah Reads last year when she discovered the lack of reading culture and literary events in Jeddah while researching social issues and cultural trends for a social organisation.
“I knew there weren’t any public libraries in Jeddah, but I was also surprised to find out that 70 per cent of schools in Jeddah did not have libraries and the ones that did were converted into storage rooms,” Merchant told Gulf News.
Get city reading
A voracious reader, Merchant formed a small team of local book lovers who together vowed to get the city reading.
Within a short span of time, they revamped and built three school libraries and stocked them up with books that were crowd sourced or sponsored by companies.
“I’m so glad that we finally have a library in our school. They’ve really helped improve the book culture because their social media accounts really inspire people to become readers,” said Madeeha, a high school student at an international school.
70 % of schools
Did not have librariesIn this fast-paced digital world where even adults also seldom pick up a book to read, Abrar Al Qayem, Jeddah Reads project manager, said that they had to think of creative and entertaining ways every month to attract people towards reading.
“I want reading to be fun and exciting. I want people to meet over a book. So, instead of giving people books to read, we host events and where authors and influencers speak about how they became successful because of reading.”
‘Pay by Book’
Popular Saudi author Rowaa Obaid attended one of the events and held an interactive session on how reading changed her life, both personally and professionally.
“Anything that would prompt them to at least pick up a book,” said Al Qayem with a smile.
The Jeddah Reads team also has a ‘Pay by Book’ campaign where they organise events and encourage coffee shops to offer their services or sell their products respectively in exchange for books.
So, instead of paying money, people pay by books, Al Qayem explains.
“We once invited five experts from different fields who offered consultancy in exchange for books. Similarly, we asked one popular coffee shop to give one shot of espresso for one book, two shots for two books, and a latte for three books for one day,” said Al Qayem.
With just these two events, Jeddah Reads collected 700 books with which they established a library for children at an underprivileged district in South Jeddah.
The dedicated team of Jeddah Reads has also developed small reading corners in five known cafes and have also helped people form book clubs for all ages in almost every district of Jeddah.
Jeddah Reads also encourages people to write and speak by holding writing and communication workshops for aspiring local writers and people who want to polish their socialising skills.
“We want the voices of our people to be heard as well. Our next literary event is about communication and writing through visual art,” said Nusaiba Tarabulsi, Jeddah Reads event manager.
An aspiring Saudi writer Yasmina Al Mutabagani published her debut novel ‘Waheeba’s Lies’ last year in English after attending a series of writing workshops by Jeddah Reads.
The group has around 25 events and workshops under their belt.
Al Qayem says she has been overwhelmed by the group’s success, but they “still have a long way to go”.
The Jeddah Reads team attended the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature last month in Dubai where they gave a 30 minute talk entitled: “Inspiring a city to read”.
