Les Nuits de la lecture: to live rare and unusual moments

After the same event in 2021 qualified as “rather successful” despite the health crisis, with more than 2,000 events organised in France and in about 30 countries, the ministry of culture points out the “rich programme” of the Nuits de la lecture 20222. This year, the event spread over four nights and a weekend, with a highlight on Saturday 21 January to “discover or re-discover reading in the form of games, activities or digital animations, onsite or remotely”.

Moments more unusual than ever

The 7th Nuits de la lecture focus on the theme of fear, “an opportunity to live and share more unusual times than ever”. Everywhere in France and even in several foreign countries, thousands of meetings and activities focused on books are organised in locations as diverse as libraries, bookshops, schools, universities, museums and event French Institutes present all over the world. Foreign cities include Madrid, Trieste, Prague, Tallinn, but also Niamey, Santo Domingo, Quito and even Tokyo!

Using the interactive map included in the dedicated website, you can easily view where events are organised in-person, in France or anywhere else in the world, but also the event available online.

Fear at the heart of the night

Who’s afraid of the dark? Really not the Nuits de la lecture, since, as the website explains, “from children fairy tales to fantasy stories, from dystopian science fiction sagas to crime stories, and modern novels and essays dealing with our inner and common terrors in the crisis we live”, it is indeed the theme of fear that “taints literature and invite us to explore any form of storytelling, all reading formats... And night in particular!”. This is how the National Book Centre (Centre National du Livre, CNL) justifies its choice of this year’s theme, which should move the audience, whether new or not, of the Nuits de la lecture.

A sponsor who knows her subject

All the more because writer Marie Darrieussecq is this year the sponsor of the event. She was revealed to the public in 1996 as soon as her first novel was published (Truismes, POL publishing), and she is “truly a dazzling success in bookshops”: more than 1 million copies sold and translated in 40 languages.

Since then, Marie Darrieussecq published about 40 books, and she presents her latest novel (Pas dormir , POL 2019), as “a personal story about insomnia, the conclusion of a 20 years long travel and panic in literature and through the nights”. She talks about her own “pantheon of insomniac writers” such as Virginia Woolf, André Gide, Cesare Pavese, Sylvia Plath, Susan Sontag, Franz Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Haruki Murakami, Aimé Césaire, Borges, and more.

A consultation to find additional ideas

In this context and to create new initiatives like the Nuits de la lecture, the CNL has just launched a major consultation called “How to develop the taste for reading in all the French?”. In cooperation with the platform make.org, the CNL has opened in early December a popular consultation.

In concrete terms, anyone may contribute to this study by sending propositions that may feed the future programme of actions of the CNL and allow to better understand the aspirations of people, and specifically young people in terms of encouragement to read.

And the CNL intends to “continue the movement initiated by the year of the Great National Cause and turn reading into a major collective stake”. The conclusions of the consultation will be publicly published in March 2023.