Denise Mina, Mairi Hedderwick and Richard Holloway at the launch of the Treasures campaign last week, by RobMcDougall.com
Denise Mina, Mairi Hedderwick and Richard Holloway at the launch of the Treasures campaign last week, by RobMcDougall.com

Last winter the Scottish Book Trust delivered the very first Book Week Scotland, a scheme that got people to focus on books, reading and writing for a week.  Naturally I am very much in favour of this sort of behaviour, and it turns out lots of other people were too because everyone had such a jolly time they have decided to do it all over again.

Book Week Scotland 2, Book Harder (not what the SBT are calling it, for reasons of that being a terrible title) will take place from November 25 to December 1, 2013 – perfect timing, because our tropical Scottish summer will be over again and everyone will be ready to curl up under the electric blanket with a book or twelve.

Having said that, in case the promise of seven days where it’s totally OK for you to eschew all other activity in favour of reading* wasn’t awesome enough, there’s also a rather fun writing campaign attached to this.  SBT are asking people to submit a piece of writing about their most cherished object for inclusion in an online collection, and there will also be a free book put together featuring the best stories and poems they receive about Scotland’s Treasures.  This book will be given out to loads of people across the country during Book Week.  That’s nice, isn’t it?

There will be lots of other things going on, although full details of the Book Week Scotland 2013 programme aren’t available yet.  To be the first person in the know, you should probably sit on www.bookweekscotland.com and continually refresh the page until they update it.  You could also follow @Bookweekscot on Twitter, and like the Book Week Scotland Facebook page.

Meanwhile if you want to enter a piece of writing into the Treasures collection, you have until July 31 at 5pm and you can submit online here: http://www.scottishbooktrust.com/treasures.  It’ll be interesting to see what people come up with – I wonder whether irn bru bars will get a look in.  They are some kind of radioactive orange booty…

*Fun fact – it’s actually illegal for your boss to get annoyed with you for reading instead of filling in spreadsheets during Book Week.**

** For the silly people amongst you – of course that is not true.  You have the dates, book it as annual leave now.