Books | National Year of Reading 2026
As Britain worries about a national decline in reading, one literary magazine is asking an important question: are we looking in the right places? The Bee, published by New Writing North, has released a special edition, Celebrating the Working-Class Bookworm, distributed with The Bookseller today. It challenges the assumption that working-class people simply don’t read.
Here are five things to know.
1. Working-class Britain does read
The Bee argues that millions of working-class readers are being overlooked because their habits don’t fit the conventional picture of book culture. They borrow library books, buy second-hand novels, swap books with friends, listen to audiobooks and read manga and comics online. That reading is often far less visible to publishers, researchers and the media, but it’s very much there.
2. Representation matters
Research commissioned by New Writing North in 2025 found that 63% of working-class readers said representation was important to them and wanted to see more people like themselves on the page. Yet fewer than 20% of people working in publishing come from working-class backgrounds. As New Writing North’s chief executive Claire Malcolm puts it, if we want more people to read, we have to make more people feel that books belong to them.
3. Real readers, real stories
Editor Richard Benson, a former editor of the iconic 90s magazine The Face, travelled through Yorkshire meeting readers. They include 16-year-old Kieran Hazzard from Hull, who learned to read through trips to the library and then helped teach his mother to read, and 16-year-old Jake Palmer, who says Sylvia Plath’s poetry helped him through the breakdown of a friendship. There’s also 85-year-old Maureen Thomson, who swaps historical romances through a supermarket book exchange.
4. Every kind of reading counts
The Bee makes the case that romance novels, comics, audiobooks and books passed from hand to hand shouldn’t be dismissed just because they sit outside the parts of book culture the industry finds easiest to see. Booker Prize winner Douglas Stuart has made a similar point, describing the women he grew up with as the most voracious and insightful readers he knows.
5. A home for working-class writers
The Bee grew out of New Writing North’s A Writing Chance programme. As well as the magazine, it includes a website, The Working Class Library podcast and The Beehive, an online space offering support and development for new and emerging working-class writers. If you love reading or writing, it’s well worth exploring.