Nominee:

The Travelling Reading Sofa

(Visit the project's website: The Travelling Reading Sofa)

Presentation of the project

The Travelling Reading Sofa began in a Bremen refugee camp as a spontaneous reading of the famous Brothers Grimm fairy tale "The Bremen Town Musicians" in the summer of 2015. The purpose of the event was to cheer up people, who were traumatised from war and flight. The tale of four castaways of different origin, becoming a team and finding a new home soon became a metaphor for "you are welcome in Bremen". The team behind the initiative started to read more stories in German and having them translated, which gave refugees the opportunity to contributing their favourite fairy tales in Arab, Dari, Fula and English. The multilingual readings gave tremendous joy to old men, stressed mothers and impatient youngsters. This was the beginning of public readings. A Syrian refugee boy dared to read the story “Town Musician” in public. Gathering in front of the red sofa, listeners unknown to each other felt interested, safe and united.

The Travelling Reading Sofa was designed as an open-air event in order to reach fans of fairy tales of all ages and cultures, who usually do not visit libraries or buy books. With this initiative, people are attracted, when they pass by an intercultural reading hour on the red travelling sofa, and they become part of a fascinated audience.

The team behind the initiative works with a combined analogue and digital strategy to make people experience the joy of reading, by travelling around the city with an appealing, red sofa. This evokes happy childhood memories for young people among the audience.

Impact

The Travelling Reading Sofa reaches all citizens of Bremen, when international favourite fairy tales are translated into the audience’s mother tongue, and when the right setting for reading and discussing such fairy tales is created.

Visible happiness of the audience and engaged conversations about a read story show the Travelling Reading Sofa team the impact of the initiative. Furthermore, they experience that the audience is growing for the events.