Reading For Pleasure

The 2026 conference will take a different format: the conference will travel through Dubai, AlAin &Abu Dhabi cities that have long been centres of learning&storytelling.

Reading for Pleasure is a five-year pilot programme created by the Emirates Literature Foundation to foster a lifelong love of reading in children.

The project seeks to engage students, parents, and teachers — otherwise known as the three points of the “education triangle” — with activities proven to help inspire a love of reading to create centres of reading excellence within select schools across the UAE.

To measure the initiative’s effectiveness, the Foundation has partnered with Zayed University, UAE University, and Birmingham University (in both the UAE and the UK) to carry out in-depth research over the next five years. And to further optimise the project’s efforts, any feedback gathered will be used to refine the programme, allowing for potential upscaling down the line.