Next week sees the start of Read Manchester‘s See Myself in Books Festival, opening Monday 17th and running until the Sunday 30th March, which aims to inspire children across the city to fall in love with reading, by introducing them to books with characters they can relate to.
The flagship event for schools will take place on Tuesday 18th March at The Stoller Hall, an event for 350 primary school pupils that will involve fantastic authors including Nathan Bryon, Dapo Adeola and Maisie Chan, with the focus on ethnic diversity in books. It will be hosted by Comics Laureate Bobby Joseph, who will then run an afternoon session with KS3 pupils on the importance of creating diverse comic book characters.
Read Manchester is a partnership between the National Literacy Trust and Manchester City Council to raise literacy levels and change the life stories of children, young people and adults across the city.
15 diverse authors will visit schools, libraries and other community venues across the city over the course of the Festival, in action-packed schedule of events.
Nathan Bryon is an actor, a BAFTA nominated writer and a Sunday Times Best Selling Author, who grew up eating as much Uxbridge Road Caribbean food as his bank balance would allow. His first book, Look Up!, illustrated by Dapo Adeola, was the number 1 picture book from a debut author and illustrator in 2019 and won the Waterstones Children’s book prize in 2020.
Nathan’s debut feature film, Rye Lane, which he co-wrote with Tom Melia was released in 2023. The film was made in partnership with BFI BBC Films and Fox Searchlight and has received 16 BIFA nominations.
Dapo Adeola is an award-winning illustrator and designer who creates characters and images that challenge expectations around race and gender in a fun and upbeat way. He is the co-creator and illustrator of bestselling picture book Look Up! and his credits also include We’re Going to Find a Monster, written by Malorie Blackman. London born and bred but of Nigerian heritage, when he’s not busy cooking up new characters and adventures, you can find Dapo running illustration and character design workshops with children or organising events to help highlight the possibilities of a career in illustration to underrepresented members of the Black diaspora.
Maisie Chan is children’s author whose debut novel Danny Chung Does Not Do Maths won the Jhalak Children’s and Y.A. Prize 2022 and the Branford Boase Award in 2022. It was also shortlisted for the Blue Peter Book Awards 2022, and longlisted for multiple school library awards. It was part of ‘Read Woke South Ayrshire’ and the North Lanarkshire ‘Read to Succeed’ tour, and is on an ‘Empathy Lab: Reading For Empathy’ list.
The current Comics Laureate is comic writer, artist, tutor and editor Bobby Joseph. Bobby follows in the footsteps of comic creators Dave Gibbons, Charlie Adlard and Hannah Berry, and illustrator and bookseller Stephen L. Holland in the unpaid role promoting the comics form, also known as ‘The Ninth Art’.
The Comics Laureate is an ambassadorial and educational role for the comics medium and aims to raise awareness of the impact comics can have in terms of increasing literacy and creativity.
Bobby is an acclaimed comic writer, artist, tutor and editor whose work has often challenged and inspired its readers. His early work includes the creation of Skankmagazine, where his best-known strip, “Scotland Yardie”, first featured later collected by Knockabout Press.
Bobby has written for The Guardian newspaper, Dazed and Confused and Vice.com. His comic work was a prominent feature at the Anarchy in the UK comic exhibition at the British Library in 2015 and was seen by over 60,000 visitors. He is also a vocal advocate for diversity and BAME representation in comic books and is credited on the BBC website as instrumental in featuring some of the “first comics by black creators featuring black characters.”
Scotland Yardie, published by Knockabout Comics in 2017, was the first BAME graphic novel to be studied as a module on an English Literature MA course at King’s College, London.
• National Literacy Trust – Read Manchester
• Schools can access teaching resources to support the ethnic diversity and neurodiversity collections and the use of these books in the classroom. If your school is interested in attending the events, please email Cheryl Pridgeon or Margaret Duff.
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John is the founder of downthetubes, launched in 1998. He is a comics and magazine editor, writer, and Press Officer for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He also runs Crucible Comic Press.
Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine and Overkill for Marvel UK, Babylon 5 Magazine, Star Trek Magazine, and its successor, Star Trek Explorer, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics; and has edited several comic collections and graphic novels, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”, and Hancock: The Lad Himself, by Stephen Walsh and Keith Page.
He’s the writer of comics such as Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs”, with Dave Hailwood.
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