Our Authors in Schools project is run in collaboration with the award winning bookshop Mainstreet Trading, in St Boswells. The event brings along well know children authors who deliver engaging talks to encourage reading and speak the children imagination. 

The authors speak to classes and assemblies at the school, talking about their work, writing style and answering questions.  Sometimes a number of small schools have joined together in one host school, which receives a class set of the author’s book. The enthusiasm brought by the authors inspires the children and brings the book to life, encouraging reading and discussions around characters and plot lines. The class teachers  usually includes the visit as part of wider literacy activity, such as the children writing their own stories, producing artwork or learning different  styles of writing.

Some of the schools have  is also visited by a mobile bookshop, in the back of a converted a Citroen H Van. A surprising number of children have never been into a bookshop and this can be due to location, few rural villages or towns have one, or a reluctance to go into one due barriers such as cost, elitism, the type of book available. The book van allows young people to experience a mini bookshop space where they can meet the books author, which help them engage with that story. The ambition of the project is that every child in the Borders meets an author during their primary school years.

Over the course of the project there has a been a wide range of authors including Micheal Morpurgo, Piers Torday, Cloe Inkpen, Emma Carol, Alom Shaha, Chris Ryan, Lyn Garnier, Helen Peters, David Solomons, Danny Scott, Lari Don.