Scottish Book Trust

Who we are

About Scottish Book Trust

Scottish Book Trust believes that reading and writing for pleasure has the power to transform lives, from supporting mental health and wellbeing to breaking the poverty cycle, improving employability and inspiring creativity.

As Scotland’s only national reading charity, our mission is to ensure people living in Scotland have equal access to books and, every year, we deliver our world-class programmes and annual awards to well over two million people.

We deliver our programmes in every local authority area in Scotland, and we work with partners ranging from small community groups to the Scottish Government. We introduce books and storytelling to pre-school children through our book gifting programmes to inspiring and empowering adult readers and writers, we believe it's never too early – or too late – to begin a magical journey with words.

Our book-gifting programmes Bookbug and Read Write Count with the First Minister reach over 310,000 children across Scotland every year. We continue the journey with schools in our communities participating in an accreditation programme to help them build and sustain a reading culture.

Our Writing Programmes encourage people to share their themed true stories through Scotland’s stories, annual New Writers Award supporting emerging writers and supporting publishers to publish and promote work written in Scots. Whilst our Reading Programmes delivers Book Week Scotland each autumn, helps fund and support author events in schools and community venues, and supports people with digital storytelling to tell their personal stories through audio and images.

You'll find us in schools, and libraries and at community events, across Scotland in towns, cities and in isolated, rural communities. We bring books to life and share the joy of reading with children in care, families living in challenging circumstances, and people in prison. In short, you’ll find us wherever we’re needed most.

Our programmes include:

Bookbug

Book Week Scotland

Reading Schools

Writing and authors programmes

Research and evaluation